A new step

Joan Ruddock is already well known to the community waste sector for piloting the Household Waste Recycling Bill through Parliament. Now the Minister responsible for waste and recycling, she speaks to Waste Paper Editor, Charles Newman, about some of the key issues

Joan Ruddock

Joan Ruddock comes to the waste and recycling portfolio with a real track record for caring about the issues involved. As did her predecessors, but they hadn’t already championed progressive recycling legislation through parliament.

So no-one can argue that Defra’s new Parliamentary Under Secretary of State isn’t green. But how does she now look back on the Household Waste Recycling Bill, an Act that requires all local authorities to ensure that every household has a collection of at least two types of recyclable waste by the year 2010?

“It was a great struggle at the time,” she cheerfully recalls, sat at the head of a large polished table in her new office. “I had great difficulty in persuading Defra to support that bill and I’m delighted that they did. I’m delighted that it became an Act of Parliament.

“When I first drafted it, it had five waste streams in it not two and so I had to moderate my ambitions. I can see now from the inside why five waste streams was just asking too much because I can see now the struggle we’ve had to persuade some Local Authorities to move at all.”

This pragmatism is one of the most discernible features of the interview. Indeed, the new Minister sounds wary of letting optimism drive her ambition, she’s conscious that not everyone is as conscientious: “I’ve managed to collect seven waste streams, but you’ve got to look realistically at the average household in terms of their storage capacity… I happen to live in a modest Edwardian semi detached house, so I’ve got a bit of space at the front, I’ve got a small garden at the back of my house and a utility room in which I can actually store for a week, or two weeks or whatever a whole load of waste, and I can have it in different containers and I can do it all without impacting on my family life, so it’s not in my kitchen.”

She has been advised that some of the best recycling schemes work with just ‘three or four streams’, though it’s not clear whether she considers materials collected in a kerbside box as a single stream. However, comingled collections are.

“We constantly have to look at research, we have to look at public opinion, we have to look at what can we get, what is the best deal we can get at the end of the day and that will vary from authority to authority.

“Comingling obviously produces contamination. The best quality has to be offset against what can you realistically get from your population, what your householders will participate in, and I think that’s where we are in some difficulties and it may be that there’s a finite number of separations that people can actually tolerate.”

She notes that on the continent countries such as Austria and Germany achieve 50 per cent diversion working within such parameters and mentions that she is waiting on advice about the quality of separations at Materials Recycling Facilities (MRFs). It’s far cry from ardently campaigning with Friends of the Earth for source separation, but such are the requirements of government.

“For me, the challenge is trying to take the broadest possible view, keep all the balls in the air, with the idea all the time that we need to reduce, we need to minimise, we need to follow the waste hierarchy.”
Again, spliced a stance of looking at ‘waste as resource’ and the ‘need to be more ambitious’, she is wary not to exceed the boundary of what Defra officials believe is possible. When asked what she thinks of the Welsh Assembly Government’s recently stated aim of 70 per cent recycling and composting by 2024, a wry smile appears: “I think they may find it’s quite tough, but I’m sure they have done their homework and if they can do it then I would be delighted, but the advice we have at the moment is 50 per cent.

“For some of the Local Authorities, it’s still going to be an uphill battle, but believe me, if I can see any chance that we can do more and do it faster then I shall be up for it.”

One thing that does now appear to be making a big difference is food waste collection. The Minister is definitely encouraged: “If we could get people to do this and if we could get the Local Authorities to collect, then I think we would make great progress. Obviously we’ve got a few examples of it happening already…. In my own experience I’m a very, very, very busy person and I just feel if I can manage that then it isn’t that difficult. Once you’ve got into the rhythm of it you can do it. I think we should get people to do it and if you couple it with anaerobic digestion producing energy you’ve got a win-win!”

It comes as no surprise to learn that Joan Ruddock has been using a Green Cone for years. She adds, “It’s been absolutely fantastic! As soon as I started separating my food waste I felt a different person. I kind of felt oh this is fantastic, I don’t put anything in my residual rubbish, in my black sack in my wheelie bin…”

She mentions that in her own constituency, Lewisham, Pepys Community Recycling which is undertaking kitchen waste collection on the Pepys Estate. “I think they are struggling to make it work and we’re looking at whether the local authority will assist them, because there’s no doubt that the local authority could not itself collect food waste from doorsteps of high rise flats. This scheme has produced a much greater participation than you would otherwise get, so it’s got real value.”

And what of the community waste sector generally? “I hope it’s possible for social enterprises to take a bigger part, there’s plenty of scope for it. I think there’s about 1,000 already in the country.”

She mentions a recycling scheme that used to operate ‘on her patch’, Aquarius, enthusing how it collected a vast array of materials from households for a charge £6 each month. “It was really, really excellent,” she recollects. “I mean the Council still hasn’t reached the point at which they had their service, but of course increasingly as councils began to roll out their own recycling programmes, the cooperative decided that it wasn’t profitable so they eventually ended their business.”

This, it seems, is not an uncommon tale in the community sector. The new Minister seems to see this an inevitable evolution: “I appreciate that with anything, where people start off innovating, they can put themselves out of a job, but I think there’s no way around that because one doesn’t want to discourage innovation.”

Indeed, there are signs that the sector and its support organisations might be in for a harder time. Recent reports in the media indicate that Defra faces a £300 million cut, with sustainable waste management, notably WRAP, likely to be affected. So is this true? “No decisions have been taken and there are obviously discussions obviously going on all the time and it includes all the bodies that we support and it has to.

“We’ve got a very tight financial settlement and we’ve got live within our means. Just because we have funded certain activities in the past doesn’t mean that those particular activities would be the ones that we would most want to fund in future years. You’ve always got to reassess priorities and that’s a very important process because there may be new things that I would like to do and some things that have been done in the past maybe their time is up.”