A puzzling question for most people right now is why the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) is so committed to introducing a punishment and reward system for household waste collection?
The basic idea sounds harmless enough: the more waste you produce the more you pay. The logic fits very neatly into the notion that it involves behavioural change by individuals.
It is the difficulties of the system’s application on the ground that have forced Defra to water down proposals to implement ‘waste reduction schemes’ and instead promote five pilot schemes. This means that after the legislation has completed its passage, the pilots have run and been evaluated, it will be at least five years before any implementation can begin and before there is any meaningful impact on the quantity of household waste produced. This will be much too late for local authorities currently looking at huge landfill tax bills.
Perhaps Defra is reacting to demand from local authorities? It is undeniable that some demand existed but it is melting away. According to a ComRes survey, which was conducted on behalf of the LGiU, only five per cent of councillors believed their council would want to trial a bin charging scheme to cut waste.
It’s likely that part of the reluctance is political. Gordon Brown’s willingness to ditch the idea when the polls turned against him won’t inspire Labour authorities. And the bin tax campaign run by Eric Pickles and the Daily Mail, combined with David Davis, which identified household waste data as a civil liberties issue, will mark out a Conservative council piloting the scheme as courageous.
There are also some pretty sound practical reasons why local authorities should be wary. An LGiU event held earlier this month explored the various waste reduction scheme possibilities and the overwhelming view was that there was still plenty of mileage in less intrusive and better understood techniques such as public education and improved recycling opportunities. In fact, we are now at the point where the market for hitherto tricky recyclables such as compost is finally taking off. Many of the delegates were concerned about the details of implementation and how to make sure a scheme is fair.
Fairness cropped up again and again. The longest running trial in South Norfolk has been discontinued because the data on bin weight using the ‘chip and bin’ system was unreliable. Even if the data can be made reliable, there are a plethora of issues involved, including the penalisation of large families, how to get flats into the scheme, who manages the shares in houses of multiple occupation and what prevents people from dumping waste in civic amenity sites.
The case gets even harder to make if you look at the national picture. Only 10 per cent of waste generated is household waste. Furthermore, it’s actually very cheap to collect the waste generated by households - about £70 per annum - so there is little financial incentive to recycle with a bin charging scheme because if you reduced your waste to zero the most you could benefit by is £70.
Waste reduction schemes represent government’s experiment in ‘personalisation’ - making the individual responsible and giving them choice. However, nearly all of the waste generated by a household is the result of decisions made further up the supply chain. The main reason a household has so much waste to get rid of is that suppliers and retailers over-package the goods we buy. They are working to reduce that packaging, but it helps the sale of the product, so progress has been frankly glacial. Consequently, choice and responsibility are illusory, it just feels like a tax.
There are clearly some major concerns but to be fair no policy that reduces the waste we generate is going to be painless and it will have to include market mechanisms. The LGiU has analysed the current waste regulatory framework and believes that there is a large hole in government thinking. Firstly, is policy targeting the right sectors of society? Secondly, is the right type of economic solution being used and thirdly does policy actually address waste reduction or just recycling and reuse?
Taking these three questions in order, the actual generators of waste are manufacturers aided by retailers, then large organisations and finally households. Any solution has to be able to encompass these key elements of the supply chain so that the feedback loops work together to reduce waste rather than have householders in one scheme, retailers in another and commercial organisations being outside any specific scheme.
The next question relates to the type of economic instrument. The current scheme requires the council tax system to charge or give rebates and entails relatively small amounts of money. As economic circumstances change the rates will have to be varied by the council to keep the cost incentive going. A much more flexible market approach is cap and trade. An independent panel of experts sets a national cap which reduces over the years and organisations either continue to generate waste and buy permits or invest in waste reduction. This is the idea behind the Local Authority Trading Scheme (LATS) but this approach works poorly because it doesn’t directly affect the generators of the waste. An effective scheme will have mandatory participation by all organisations that generate a certain amount of waste and voluntary participation by households or communities through community recycling networks. The local authority role will be to facilitate take up, provide advice, approve data quality and improve facilities for those wishing to reduce their waste.
Finally, many of the waste reduction schemes that have been coming out Europe are focused on producer responsibility, by providing encouragement to take back the waste generated over the life cycle of a product. This is a good idea but it has limitations. Continual loops of recycling require energy inputs at each turn and they have not succeeded in reducing the amount of waste we produce. But the strength of the waste reduction schemes is that they did focus on the right challenge.
The time has come for a more sophisticated approach to waste reduction that doesn’t place the onus on the individual consumer and council tax payer but shares the load between producers and consumers, and allows local authorities to get on with providing a good service.
Dr Andy Johnston is head of the LGiU’s Centre for Local Sustainability (ends)