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Make haste, stop waste - UK waste needs sorting urgently [see red text update Oct.07]

25/04/2007

While Britain is fast running out of landfill sites and is in danger of disappearing under its own rubbish heap...

Make haste, stop waste

UK waste needs sorting urgently

While Britain is fast running out of landfill sites and is in danger of disappearing under its own rubbish heap, other EU member states’ waste management is so successful that a total ban on landfill from household waste is becoming reality. ‘Green Dot’ holds the key to sustainable waste management: it paves the way to responsible product and packaging design and encourages ‘green’ consumer behaviour – all of which are vital elements in the struggle to combat climate change.

Any successful enterprise needs to work towards a goal; sound management practice demands that targets are set for a given point in the future and the combined effort by everyone involved in an operation to work towards meeting those targets. As early as 1994 the European Union passed the EU Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste and set targets to be met in order to save valuable primary resources and to lower greenhouse gas emissions – by now almost universally accepted as the cause for global warming. The directive is aimed at preventing waste generation and at promoting reuse and recycling in an attempt to lower the environmental burden of modern-day living and consumption.

Today, in 2007, the realisation that climate change is threatening the sheer survival of mankind is finally dawning on even the most die-hard sceptics. Politicians the world over are scrambling to be seen as the leader on environmentally-friendly policies. However, the ones that shout the loudest and set ambitious targets don’t always turn out to be the ones that ‘implement’ the hardest or indeed, practice what they preach.

Nowhere does this become clearer than in the case of the UK’s performance under the EU Directive on waste disposal and packaging waste: dumping 27 million tonnes of rubbish every year into landfill – 7 million more than any other European nation and double that of Germany who has 25% more people to produce waste – resulted in Britain being branded the “dustbin of Europe”. The simple fact that methane gas from landfill has 23 times the global warming impact of CO2 means that it is more than just an embarrassment to end up at the bottom of the league for a highly industrialised nation that only recently presided over the G8; it is an environmental and socioeconomic disaster. The failure to tackle waste in the face of ‘best practice’ examples being readily available and accessible from nearby EU neighbour states places serious doubts on the Government’s green credentials. So, how did Britain end up trailing behind its EU counterparts?

The Green Dot in Europe Explained

Green Dot is currently the standard take-back programme in 21 European countries and Canada and is based on the ‘producer/polluter pays’ principle. Its aim is to reduce packaging waste at source and to maximise the recovery of used packaging, eliminate harmful materials and encourage the recycling of the recovered waste into new products and packaging.

 The Green Dot (Grüner Punkt) does not mean that this packaging is recyclable or is made of recycled material. It is a financing symbol that denotes that for packaging bearing this symbol a financial contribution has been made by the producer, i.e. a manufacturer or filler, to a packaging recovery organisation, a so-called compliance scheme. The fee covers the cost of collection, sorting and recycling and is calculated according to the volume, material type and weight of the packaging used by the producer. Green Dot originated in Germany in 1991 to finance the Duales System Deutschland (DSD), a not for profit packaging recovery organisation (in Austria, another country with an impressive recycling performance, the comparable organisation is ARA). Under German packaging regulations suppliers are under obligation to take back and recycle up to 70% of their packaging and submit audited documents to prove it. The Green Dot can be applied to the packaging when the licence fee has been paid. Householders are provided with two bins for their waste, one for normal waste and one, usually yellow bin, for products bearing the Green Dot symbol. This makes sorting very easy for consumers, as the Green Dot logo quickly identifies what can be collected for recycling and what cannot. DSD arranges for the collection of the yellow bin and arranges contracts with reprocessing companies to reprocess the recovered waste. Even in public areas such as railway stations, airports or shopping precincts, rubbish bins with several holes for different waste types encourage the public to separate waste while out and about. Getting it wrong is a possibility that cannot be ruled out, but contamination between the various material types is tackled later on as the recovered waste is being sorted again post-collection by the compliance companies.

The Green Dot is the most widely used trademark in the world and can be found on the majority of European packaging, where it signifies to consumers that the company cares about the environment and is fulfilling its obligations. The logo itself does not necessarily have to be green, but can be any colour to blend in with the chosen packaging design.

The Proof is in the Pudding

Each country’s implementation of the EU directive varies according to their national regulations on waste and their ‘individual interpretations’ of the directive. However, what can be seen after 13 years of practical application is that countries operating the more sophisticated Green Dot approaches are rewarded with greater success in waste prevention and management. Green Dot is  responsible for Germany’s recycling rates ranging between 60% and 70% for many materials and provides clear incentives to industry to reduce their packaging volume, use recycled materials or introduce re-usable alternatives, for example in form of deposit-refund schemes for beverages (think bottles).

91% of Germans separate their waste and the majority see waste separation as their own personal contribution to environmental protection. Helped by a high level of recycling awareness in the population Germany’s waste recovery rate doubled from 37.3% in 1991 to 76.7% in 2000 and regularly surpasses government-set recycling targets. From this summer the country is putting a ban on sending household waste to landfill. In Belgium disposal in landfill fell from 46.3% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2003 while recycling rose from 28.1 to a staggering 80.3%.

Of course, the system is, much like any other, open to exploitation. There are some companies that benefit without paying. They may be using the logo without paying fees; or there may be packaging material not bearing the Green Dot symbol that enters the recycling stream and is recycled for free. These so-called ‘free riders’ act against the Producer Responsibility Obligation and cause the licence fee to be higher than it should be. Stringent checks are made and fines for free riders range around £30,000 to act as a deterrent. In recent years the Duales System Deutschland has come under criticism for being expensive due to its monopolist position and the lack of competition. The system has now been opened up to allow other compliance companies a share of the lucrative waste processing market. Whether or not this move is going to improve recycling targets further still remains to be seen.

Recycling in the UK

While the Green Dot financing model guarantees packaging recycling and has significantly changed the waste market in Europe, the UK has fallen behind since first introducing its interpretation of the directive in 1997. In contrast to other EU countries the UK Government, trying to get the backing of as many industry sectors as possible, put in place a highly complex and controversial shared-cost system. Bowing to industrial pressure groups the scheme’s main maxim was and is to achieve EU targets at the lowest possible cost to industry. The Government’s hands-off approach during the early years of the directive coupled with its decision to allow anybody to run a compliance scheme has led to over 20 compliance scheme operators competing for business. While this has kept costs for industry down, it has produced a weight-oriented system that gives preference to the much easier (since more homogenous) and cleaner recovery of commercial and industrial waste. In addition, compliance operators and local authorities favour heavy waste streams such as newspapers, magazines and glass as recovery targets are reached much faster. As a consequence, the post-consumer waste stream which proves logistically more difficult is largely ignored, paradoxically though this is also the point where most of everything that is ever produced ends up as waste!

The UK operates the Packaging Recovery Note or PRN system, whereby ‘obligated’ companies demonstrate that they have met their recovery and recycling targets. The PRN system has been highly controversial and clearly lacks the sophistication and reliability of the Green Dot programme. For a start, under UK packaging regulations smaller businesses are exempt from their producer responsibility obligation. Producers only qualify as ‘obligated companies’ if they exceed an annual turnover of £2 million and if their packaging handling exceeds 50 tonnes per year. This ruling alone leaves an awful lot of packaging waste every year unaccounted for. It also totally negates the producer responsibility scheme’s objective, which is to ensure that all costs of recovery and recycling are covered by the producer or polluter. As a result taxpayers pick up at least part of the bill to finance municipal collection, since local authorities are responsible for the recovery of waste from households.

The lack of a coherent national strategy and overarching legislation has resulted in huge regional variations in recycling efforts and success rates. In recent years local authorities have undoubtedly made vast improvements and public awareness is increasing. However, the picture is fragmented and the process of change is slow given the urgency of the problem of climate change. Most people take their paper, glass, cans and plastic drink bottles to bring banks when shopping at their local supermarkets and believe that this is all they can do. And to be fair, in the absence of a more diversified recycling infrastructure and recycling facilities this is in fact, true! Although kerbside or doorstep collections are now increasing, the types of materials collected for recycling are limited and again, favour the above mentioned material types. The material that is recovered and recycled by far the least in the UK is plastic. Plastics are more labour-intensive as they come in many different types that are incompatible with one another in terms of recycling and therefore need to be sorted first. However, made almost entirely from oil, plastic takes hundreds of years to degrade in landfill or produces toxic smoke when incinerated. On the plus side however, it can quite easily be reprocessed and used again to make new plastic products.  

The UK’s Green Dot Riddle

To compound confusion, most products on British retail shelves these days also carry the Green Dot symbol, but while in EU countries the protected trademark represents the fact that a contribution has been paid for the packaging to be collected and recycled, in the UK the logo is rendered absolutely meaningless. It is there for a number of reasons: Firstly, the packaging was produced for non-country specific retail, i.e. a single production run caters for several international markets; secondly, the company uses the logo as a marketing tool, presenting a responsible and ‘green’ image to the public.

Despite opting out of the Green Dot programme and implementing derivative legislation to its EU counterparts, for some obscure reason the Government still felt the need to ‘regulate’ the use of the Green Dot trademark and vested VALPAK, one of the largest compliance companies in the UK, with the task of managing its licensing. A company may or may not use the symbol on its products sold in the UK, but when they do they have to pay an annual flat licence fee of between £100 and £500 pounds to the Green Dot Licensing Company – irrespective of the tonnage of their packaging. VALPAK explains why joining the scheme makes sense for a UK producer on its website: [The licence fee is used] “not as a financing symbol in the UK …. [but] is ensuring the integrity of the trademark and that it is not used in a misleading fashion or in derogation of its meaning in any way”. The mind boggles – isn’t this a total derogation of the Green Dot’s original meaning? And can a trademark really be bothered about its “integrity”? Somebody is making money out of selling the emperor’s new clothes!

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The problem with waste or climate change is that it is invisible. How can you believe there is a problem when you cannot see it or feel its effects? The polar ice is melting thousands of miles away and our rubbish disappears conveniently out of sight with weekly regularity. Only once a year around Christmas, when the bin men skip a week, our rubbish becomes clearly visible and an issue: As waste bins are filled beyond capacity we are left with bulging black bin liners, our very own waste mountains. No need to panic though, as salvation is only a few days away – when the unsightly evidence is removed with the next collection!

Visualising ‘the problem’ or rather the sheer amount of waste and by logical conclusion, pollution, becomes easier when looking at a concrete case with actual figures. Let’s take Walkers Crisps for example, an all-time British favourite, now owned by PepsiCo with headquarters in Switzerland (not an EU member). Walkers’ Leicester plant alone produces “10 million bags 360 days a year” and the company puts 5.2 billion bags on the UK market every year – all coincidentally bearing the Green Dot. In Germany or Austria consumers could simply throw these bags into their yellow bins for recycling, here they go to landfill. But why, as Walkers must surely qualify as an ‘obligated company’ under the PRN system, easily exceeding the £2 million turnover and 50 tonne packaging thresholds? The reason: legal loopholes; in this case firms based abroad are allowed to escape their obligation as they are not registered under the UK producer responsibility system. PepsiCo’s response: “We are of course concerned about pack recycling and the biggest issue we face as a business is the practicality of getting consumers to recycle their empty packs. All of our packaging is fully recyclable and we make consumers aware of this by printing the recycling logo on the back of all our packs.” Well, not quite! The logos on Walkers Crisp packs are the Green Dot – which we know is a financing symbol – and ‘The Tidyman’ or Keep Britain Tidy logo. Neither tells consumers that this aluminium foil bag is a valuable recyclable resource. 5.2 billion packs, simply going to waste each year in the UK – not just a wasted opportunity in terms of environmental protection, but also in terms of a sound business venture with immense potential for employment creation. There’s money to be made in recycling and British companies have been very slow to seize upon it.

The lack of facilities and recycling infrastructure is, of course, the main drawback that thwarts recycling, exemplified by carton recycling. With just one dedicated carton recycling plant at the Smith Anderson paper mill in Fife, Scotland, for the whole of the UK, it is little surprise that carton recycling (e.g. juice and milk cartons) manages a meagre 1% recycling rate. Compare that with a whopping 97% in Luxembourg and it becomes truly shameful. The Scottish plant could process 1/5 of all UK carton waste; it follows that Britain needs 4 more reprocessing plants – strategically placed around the country to minimise transport costs and emissions. According to Tetra Pak’s website the challenge is “… to promote post-consumer carton collection schemes with local authorities and community recycling networks.” In essence, what industry needs is for the government to legislate, to raise public awareness and instil a recycling culture, and to implement comprehensive doorstep collections from consumers.[1]

[1]Since writing this article I have now learnt that Smith Anderson no longer operates drink carton recycling as it proved uneconomical, presumably because it couldn’t secure enough of the waste material for the a.m. lack of collection infrastructure. This is even more disconcerting, as the cartons are “…100% recyclable – recycling 1 tonne of the cartons saves 900 kg of greenhouse gas emissions and two to three cubic metres of landfill.” “They’re fully recyclable but they’re not being fully recycled,” he says, explaining that without the infrastructure and systems for collection, sufficient quantities of the packs are not available to create a market for the recycled materials.” [both quotes publ. in FT.com 27.10.05, by Sarah Murray]. By contrast, 275 sorting centres in Germany achieved a recycling rate of 65% of all cartons sold in 2002 [according to Tetra Pak’s recycling leaflet [www.tetrapak.com/docs/recyclingleaflet2003/pdf].

Wake Up and Smell the Stench

Experts estimate that the UK has just 9 years left to keep dumping its waste into landfill. Sending waste abroad to developing countries is unethical and only takes it out of our sight, but not out of the global pollution equation. It is high time for urgent action. The government must stop denying its citizens the chance to recycle and must rapidly adopt a system that works; institutionalised free-riding has to end. There’s no need to search far as tried-and-tested approaches are available: the UK can take their pick from what is working for their EU counterparts. The British government must overcome its historic reluctance to adopt EU policies and embrace Green Dot, an EU tool that has clearly proven its worth. A quick round-up of the major benefits:

  1. What can and cannot be recycled is clear-cut: the Green Dot signals to consumers to put this packaging in their yellow bins for collection.
  2. The recycling payment structure is more immediate and accurate.
  3. As licence fees are calculated based on the amount of material (tonnage) placed on the market under the polluter pays principle, producers have a clear incentive to prevent waste by way of designing more efficient packaging and products which are lighter, smaller and better recyclable.
  4. Waste prevention at source means valuable resources are preserved.
  5. As a result of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ large amounts of primary energy is saved, cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
  6. New industries, markets and jobs are being created.
  7. Consumers pay for what they buy, use and discard. They can be certain their contribution goes into recycling their waste (e.g. when buying a packet of whipped cream the cost towards recycling amounts to 0.01 of a Euro or 0.0067 of a £).

Waste management plays a fundamental part in combating climate change. If the Government’s latest pledges to set binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 are to mean anything, it will have to clean up its act and landfill sites first.

Not in the distant future with nobody around to remember their pledges, but right here, right now.



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