TWP editor Charles Newman reviews some of the key strands in Waste Strategy 2007

After much speculation, consultation and inevitable delay, the Government published its latest waste strategy for England last month. So far, the reaction has been surprisingly favourable, though notably one leading player in the industry only had the courage to say as much after Ben Bradshaw had left a recent meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Sustainable Waste Group.

So what kind of strategy have we got? One, it seems, very focussed on delivering reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. If government sources are to be believed, much of the delay with this strategy was because of David Milliband’s desire that it fit with the growing priority to meet the challenges of global warming. This has had the benefit of focussing thought more on the whole life-cycle of products and their constituent materials, something many of us have been asking to see for many years.

The dominating concern of counting carbon, the way dieticians count calories, means we are entering a much more fine tuned age, paying more attention to where materials come from as well as where they go. No longer will waste be treated as a homogenous mass, well at least as far as Defra is concerned, but don’t hold your breath if you expect we are arriving at a closed-loop economy – the price of fuel will have to rise a lot further before this seems like a practical necessity.


One of the most important measures of a successful sustainable waste strategy will be the decoupling of economic growth from waste arisings. Already there are signs this link is breaking, though notably the costs of waste management in the UK continue rise well above the rate the economy is growing. In some respects this is inevitable, the rising costs of landfill will continue to have a significant impact. And this strategy signals the government’s desire to end our reliance on landfill, raising the landfill tax escalator from £3 per annum to £8. Admittedly, if it had been more ambitious on this front in the first place then the current waste minister wouldn’t be expressing concern about meeting our 2013 targets.

Alongside this, the government has raised targets for recycling and composting, with a level of 50 per cent by 2020 in its sights. Something some Defra officials were prone to denying was possible a few years ago, and given this perhaps they might stop denying that one day the idealistic notion of zero waste might be more than just a front-of-pipe dream. Indeed, it is noticeable in the strategy the emphasis given to designing out waste (some rather unspecific eco-design requirement for manufacturers in mentioned), producer responsibility and a greater focus on by-products of particular sectors. It remains to be seen how much direct action and resources Defra will get to deliver on this front, other than meeting the EC Directives that impact in this area.

In tune with this thinking, the strategy seems to promote principles long-endorsed by the community waste sector, namely to extract the maximum value of our waste resources we need to preserve the integrity of waste materials: “A key to more efficient recovery of materials and energy is the greater segregation and sorting of waste at (or close to) its source.”

But before anyone gets carried away, thinking the government has endorsed source-separation, it should be noted there is talk of waste ‘separated by the householder’ for ‘joint kerbside collection’. Reading between the lines, it appears the government recognises the principle of source separation, but perhaps not yet the practice. The worry is that it could take another seven years to do this, and by then much of the UK’s secondary materials industry will have suffered, as well as householders continuing to see their recycling treated more like waste than resources.

Encouragingly, the government does lend its support for separate collection of food waste and tacitly alternate weekly collection of residuals (as long as the Daily Mail doesn’t realise this is the case!). Again, the community waste sector has long thought this would be the way to go, and it is encouraging the strategy scales back on the anticipated needed for large scale residual treatment plants. That’s not to say we will not see a significant rise in the number of planning applications approved, which somehow have greater stakeholder engagement with a streamlined process. (Is it cynical to say these are likely to be incompatible ambitions?)

Significantly, there is support for a more modular approach to waste treatment facilities, Anaerobic Digestion (AD) being singled out for special mention. With an expectation on the likely increase in petrol prices and a need to manage waste locally, we can expect to see officials from Defra’s new created Waste Infrastructure Delivery Programme (WIDP) roaming the countryside for farms to site a raft of new AD plants. In tow we are likely to find officials from a new Joint Waste Authorities as they merge, following the legislation in the forthcoming Local Government and Public Health Involvement Bill.

How this squares with the strategy’s stated concern to disaggregate waste contracts remains to be seen. It says: “The Government now discourages integrated contracts which bundle together collection, treatment and sometimes other services unnecessarily. Such contracts have in the past served to exclude smaller providers, including many third sector providers, from the market. The move to disaggregated contracts has the potential to open the market for less capital intensive services such as collection services.”

This is no doubt music to the community waste sector ears, but it remains to be seen how much effect such endorsement will have. After all, local authorities are notoriously risk averse, and without market capitalisation, it is hard to see how many competent community sector operators will be able to win, when they have little underwrite them against difficult times. Four years after the previous waste minister promised to address this issue, Defra appears to have taken its first steps. However, it’s clear that it now hopes the Office of the Third Sector will take this issue on.

That said, there is more recognizing the role of the third sector in service delivery than in any previous policy statement. It even recognises that by delivering on ‘social benefits alongside environmental objectives, …third sector organisations [are] increasingly attractive potential delivery partners for local authorities in particular.’

There’s no doubt this is a big plus from a department that is focused on tonnages and the primacy of the Landfill Directive. So what measures does the strategy set out for building on the contribution of the community waste sector? Notably, it appears that funding will be available through the Futurebuilders programme from March of next year, and with the statement ‘the Government wants third sector organisations to win an even bigger share of the waste management market, Defra has asked WRAP to draw-up, develop and implement a programme of work to increase the third sector’s capacity to operate in the waste and recycling sector.’ The ball it seems is well and truly in other department’s court.

All in all the signs are encouraging, though as always there is room for much more ambition. Everyone recognises that it is an evolving strategy, and this iteration perhaps marks the first significant step in no longer seeing waste as waste, but as resources moving through different stages of a life-cycle.