Recently, one of the recycling sector’s news websites carried a story under the heading of ‘Church takes cool stance on “resource”’. At first glance, it made me muse briefly on why the Church of England had seen fit to make a policy statement about waste and resources, and then I realised of course that they weren’t referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury but in fact to Dr Colin Church, Defra’s new man in charge of waste policy as part of his job as Director of Climate, Waste and Atmosphere.

It reported his speech at the recent major conference organised by CIWM (with the ESA) where, in a session under the theme of zero waste, he made the point that although so many in the industry were now talking about waste as a ‘resource’ and trying to stop the use of the word ‘waste’, the reality was that there was a “shed load of policy on waste” which was defined in legal terms specifically using that word, and so the word could not simply be written out of use by our industry.

He is of course correct – there is no denying the many pieces of legislation on the statute books both in the UK and EU where waste is legally defined; these provide the basis for so much of the necessary regulations. Even recent moves in the opaque and technocratic world of European legislation that seeks, in theory, to assist recyclers by determining the points at which waste regulation doesn’t apply to their operations isn’t called ‘Start of Product’ – it’s called ‘End of Waste’...

I had listened to this speech from the auditorium, and didn’t expect the headline that it generated. I had heard a pretty factual observation from Dr Church about the practicalities of the fact that most legislation in our arena is based on the legal concept of waste and its need for management for environmental and public health purposes – so get over it.

The point being made was that we are in a transition period, although for some of us who have thought in terms of resources not waste for many a long year (including the publishers of this wonderful magazine!) I do wonder how long the transition now needs to be – people have been writing and talking about the move from waste to resources for at least a decade, probably longer! It is true to say though that our economy still generates many materials that are not successfully reused or recycled in the home economy, never mind in any export market, and that, although there are many optimistic signals, we are some way away from the circular, resource-based economy that many of us wish to see and which is now being championed in some influential quarters.

Given that the mixed use of the words ‘waste’ and ‘resource’ seem to give some folk trouble, maybe we could try a different tack on the lexicon? For inspiration I went back to the 1990s and recalled the singer Prince (he of Purple Rain fame) making the announcement that he was changing his name to which became a talking point of course, and a headache for DJs – so much so that they were then forced to call him the ‘artist formerly known as Prince’ which didn’t exactly trip off the tongue.

Maybe this is what we should do, and simply refer to waste as and see what happens.

There’s only one snag with this though (well actually there are several!): he changed it back after four years as nobody understood what he was on about.

Oh well, back to the drawing board. Now, what’s happening with that ‘waste policy review’?!