R: So does weight matter or could you just do it on frequency? SHH: We have a few commercial customers who pay by weight, truly pay by weight, but the majority of our customers pay for weight data to understand what’s going on and to put into place schemes that reduce the number of bins or move stuff from one bin to another. It’s more about getting knowledge through data rather than actually paying for weight in its simplest form. LM: With municipal collections, you can control the weight to a certain extent by the size of the container, and have people pay for different sized containers. I’d be sceptical about going by weight, as the Irish are considering (they’ve got the Wild West system of the competition in the market), because you’re talking about a small amount per week. SHH: Another interesting point when you’re talking about weight is are we trying to push people to put less weight in the bin because that’s a monetary line for tax purposes, or do we want to push them to put less valuable materials? In that case you might use a different metric, perhaps pay by climate change impact – you might completely redesign the system. DH: Bringing weight into the system, I think you could set a residual waste per household target and then charge people a certain levy per kilogramme above the average, and then refund it back to the people who are below, so we’ve got a revenue neutral system. You’re giving people an incentive always to be below the average and so it means they go dynamically – harder and harder to get below the average. SHH: You also have to work out what you do with your HWRCs, as otherwise the more savvy people will realise that actually they can use those. You could get three or four visits a year and the rest are paid for. LM: The important thing in setting up the policy is making sure there aren’t loopholes for people to avoid charges, but one of my frustrations when we discuss pay as you throw in this country is that everyone puts their energies into all the barriers and identifying them. If they put the same amount of energy into the solutions for those barriers, we’d be over them fairly quickly. R: So, if everyone here were asked to advise on it, what would be your preferred method? LM: There needs to be an element of choice for the householder in terms of either incurring the charge or not, and it needs to be designed to change behaviour, which ultimately will be about the financial levels being set right. For me, the Mecca is that it makes people think about their waste when they buy things.

SHH: I’d go down the route of logarithmic penalty for over service, because that creates a barrier that you can avoid if you comply. I’d also add a significant inconvenience for that on the basis that convenience drives a lot of things, and therefore inconvenience will drive it the other way. What we’ve seen in commercial is competitive spirits and we are naturally as a species competitive, so I would also have something about filling data in, and therefore feedback on how well you the householder are doing compared to your average. And then, if we were going weight based at the public end, I would go CO2 minimisation avoidance on a packaging basis and extend the plastic bag charge to other packaging.

DH: I have a long list. I’d read chips on the bins so you don’t have as many arguments from people who you’ve collected from. I’d put the charging system around 60 per cent fixed, 40 per cent variable on average and on residual only. I’d do it either based on frequency or frequency and weight and you could in more rural areas give people a choice for the size of container. I would bill in advance so you don’t get bad debtors. I would allow a fixed rate fee to include a minimum amount of residual pick-ups. I’d probably do dry recyclables in either clear sacks or boxes. In the ideal world it would all be funded by producer responsibility anyway. I’d quite like to have more HWRCs, and I’d like my HWRCs to offer a really wide range of recyclables because you’ll get an uplift in the flow of recyclables to HWRCs when you charge for residual, because people are trying to segregate more.

JT: Mine is relatively straightforward. I’d charge for a standard service and add additional costs for additional elements of service. It has to be communicated really, really clearly, and in order to do that I think it needs to be informed by, designed to a degree, by normal people (not us, because we’re a very unusual group of individuals), and heavily market tested. There are large swathes of the public out there who do stand to get access to a fairer, better system – better in terms of quality, better in terms of the amount of money they ultimately have to pay, and ultimately in terms of better use of local government resources and better access to other services.

R: Now, the question is: how do we take variable charging from what seems to be a widely held view in an industry and get the politicians to adopt it?

LM: If they think the voters aren’t going to give them grief over it then it’s not an issue for them to oppose it. And the more and more likely it looks like we won’t hit the 50 per cent recycling target for 2020, the more and more concerned politicians should be, and the more likely they are to take action on something. These EU targets are one of the biggest hooks we as an industry could have with government in terms of getting it back on the agenda. So many years ago, it perhaps was too early because we still thought we could meet 50 per cent – we had years left and we were all introducing new schemes, and we hadn’t had an economic financial meltdown across the globe.

JT: And I think that’s where the cross-party support comes from because once it’s not a politically divisive issue, it’s just normal. When you get under the skin of it, it’s not a manifesto party political issue and in fact I think there will be a lot of support for a commonsense system that has upsides for a large majority of people.

SHH: I think we’ve missed the plot a little bit of how to communicate this, if people are getting angry because little Johnny will have to pay more to throw his waste away. Actually, we need to show that there’s a whole part of the community who are paying over the odds because little Johnny is throwing too much away – it’s about equalisation.

LM: Maybe we need to rebrand this statement, maybe it’s save as you throw.

SHH: Change duty of care to duty to care. The Daily Mirror or whoever are the opposite of the Daily Mail should be screaming that they’re paying far too much to make up for all those people who put too much in their bin. I think if you say, actually, this is about empowering those people that want to do the right thing, there’s some motive there somewhere that’s interesting to politicians, or so I’m told.

And it would be good for any local government, whatever the colour of the local authority, to say they’ve been able to implement something that saves a few million quid from the waste bin and reinvest it in other services.

R: To get traction, does this need an industry-backed campaign?

JT: I’d say yes.

LM: Yes, but it needs more than that because otherwise you’re just another professional interested group.

DH: I don’t know about a cross-industry campaign. It feels as though the industry is tainted in the eyes of people like the Daily Mail, like we don’t get Johnny the Mail reader.

LM: I think as an industry most of us would probably agree you need pay as you throw, but I still think there are people who don’t because of the problems involved, so I think if we could get general consensus around how it might look and how we tackle those barriers, then I think we can start going forward.

JT: To an extent, we want to pilot the theory almost rather than actually piloting the scheme – focus group style, sitting with a room of people who would be affected perhaps in different ways, to work through a system and work out exactly how they might use it and benefit from it, which makes the case, which then gives you the campaign platform.

R: Are there thoughts that haven’t come to the party yet that anyone wants to share?

LM: The thing that is stopping it ultimately at the moment is the way waste services are designed. The policy is set at a national level by politicians and it’s implemented at a local level by politicians, so as long as they perceive that people don’t like it they’re not going to step forward and do the pilots.

R: And if it’s not an industry campaign, what’s going to light the fire under them?

LM: The Daily Mail seems to do it on most occasions.

JT: It looks like an 180 degree flip if you were to get the Mail, the Express or whatever to back this change, but actually I think there’s a whole load of logic there.

LM: Maybe that’s where as an industry some of the first steps could be: canvassing public opinions and doing the research, and if the research does start to show that actually people aren’t against the idea as everyone thinks, there’s traction for it, then you start building that evidence up and start to put it out there.

JT: We need to recruit Daily Mail readers to test their opinions on it.

SHH: Those who have light bins and don’t really want to support other people that don’t.

DH: Write in as Stuart from... Stuart says, I hate this bloody system where you don’t get charged, the guy next door to me chucks loads into a bin and he pays the same as me – it’s bloody crazy.

And that was just the beginning. Our experts also brought to the variable charging roundtable their thoughts on incorporating producer responsibility, the role of the private contractors in any potential free market, the need for consistency across authorities and many other related topics. Watch this space...