A group of councils, led by Bristol City Council (BCC), has written an open letter to central government calling for the standardisation of reporting of process losses from composting and mechanical biological treatment (MBT) facilities.
Dated 30 June, and addressed to the: Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA); the Department for Communities and Local Government; and The Environment Agency, the letter highlights an ‘accounting inconsistency in national reporting’ that ‘discriminates’ against local authorities using MBT facilities when reporting recycling performance to central government agencies.
According to the councils, waste that is composted in MBT facilities undergoes an ‘identical’ biodegradation process to traditional green waste composting, both of which produce a composting or ‘process loss’ comprised mainly of water vapour and a low hazardous leachate.
However, the web-based system for municipal waste data reporting, Waste Data Flow (WDF), only allows for process loss to be counted as recycling for green waste composting facilities, but not for MBT facilities, even though both methods use ‘identical in-vessel composting techniques’.
‘No cost solution benefits some local authorities and has no detrimental impact on any others’
As an example, BCC claims that between nine and 11 per cent of the waste input to its MBT in Avonmouth is released as process loss, which cannot be recorded as recycling. It notes that if it were allowed to include process loss, it would be ‘significantly closer’ to reaching the European target of recycling 50 per cent of waste by 2020.
It adds that North Somerset , Bath and North East, and Somerset councils would have also already achieved the target, and other MBT councils (such as Dorset, Newcastle, East Anglia and Leicestershire) would also see benefits if the ‘reporting error’ was fixed.
As such, the councils are calling on central government to change the reporting system so that all inputs to MBTs can be counted as recycled, as is the case for composting facilities.
The letter reads: ‘Bristol City Council [has] identified a discrepancy in national reporting which favours one facility type over another. [It has] suggested a reasonable, no cost solution, which benefits some local authorities and has no detrimental impact on any other local authority.
‘Bristol City Council has consulted with Defra representatives on the issue of process loss. We would appreciate your correspondence and attention to resolving this relatively simple, although important, matter and we are happy to discuss this further at any point.’
Read the open letter on process loss reporting standardisation.
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