Back in the days when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was a bit more united than it is now, recycling hadn’t really made the political agenda and wasn’t exactly a strong point: in 1999, the UK as a whole recycled or composted around 10 per cent of municipal waste (which was far less than our European neighbours – Austria and Germany had already surpassed the 50 per cent mark and the average European recycling rate was more than double ours at 23.9 per cent!). In the 16 intervening years since devolution, though, much has changed, and in 2013, the country as a whole recycled 43.5 per cent of municipal waste according to Eurostat (the figures for household waste alone are marginally lower – at 43.4 per cent for the 2013 calendar year, for example), though it’s fair to say that progress has slowed in recent years.

It’s not been uniform progress, however, as the different UK administrations have adopted different tactics (with varying degrees of urgency and success) in attempting to become more resource-efficient. As Iain Gulland, then WRAP’s Director for Scotland and now Zero Waste Scotland’s Chief Executive, told us in advance of the general election in 2010: “In many ways, the challenge for all the administrations is the same. We all want the same things – to reduce waste going to landfill, to make better use of resources, to prevent waste at source, to engage with retailers. Everybody wants to do all the right things, it’s just the approach is slightly different.” Now, as another election nears, we thought it time to check in and see how each of the administrations is getting on.

England

After years of steadily (some would say sharply) rising recycling rates, England’s figures are flatlining. The years between 2000/01 and 2009/10 saw the rate jump from just over 10 per cent to more than 40, but, more recently, the outgoing coalition government has presided over a marked stalling of recycling rates. Some are now worried that England could even start to backslide: for the calendar year 2013, official figures show the country recycled 44.2 per cent of household waste, only 0.1 per cent more than the year before.

Whether or not rates actually drop, the current level of increase will not be enough for England to meet existing revised Waste Framework Directive targets from Europe, let alone more ambitious goals that could yet be introduced in the revised Circular Economy Package. (New targets are, of course, opposed by the current administration, with Defra saying, counter intuitively, that they ‘would be unlikely to improve the current system’.) Indeed, towards the end of last year, the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee released the ‘Waste Management in England’ report, that warned the country will not ‘play its role in meeting the European requirement… to recycle at least 50 per cent of its household waste by 2020 without significant government intervention’. Launching the stinging critique of Defra, EFRA Chair Anne McIntosh (herself a Conservative MP) said: “Defra ‘stepped back’ from waste management at a time when we need both a more ambitious approach to waste management and stronger government leadership to drive up static recycling rates in England… Ministers must now show that waste policy remains an important priority.”

To say that there has been no ‘government leadership’ in the realm of waste over the course of this coalition isn’t quite true, however – it’s just that the leadership was coming not from Defra and was headed (most in the industry would argue) in the wrong direction! We’re referring, of course, to Local Government Minister Eric Pickles, who has made it his crusade to defend the ‘basic right’ of weekly residual waste collection. At a time when local authorities up and down the country were dealing with extremely squeezed budgets, Pickles found £250 million to encourage a switch back to weekly collection. It’s a bribe that most councils ignored (or used to set up separate food waste collections), and the one authority that was due to revert to weekly through the scheme – Stoke-on-Trent – has abandoned the plans because ‘massive budget cuts’ mean the government money would not cover the costs. More recently, Pickles found another £11.1 million to offer councils to run incentive schemes (again, on condition that they collect waste on a weekly basis), but murmurs that he would legislate for minimum service standards – probably including weekly collections – have gone quiet. Instead, DCLG is now targeting ‘backdoor bin charges’, and earlier this year pushed

through legislation that bans authorities from charging residents to use household waste recycling centres (HWRCs), despite many local authorities voicing opposition to the proposals. LARAC CEO Lee Marshall stated that the “undue haste with which this has been railroaded through gives the impression that this was a consultation in name only” and noted that while “all waste disposal authorities [WDAs] have to and will provide free-to-use [HWRCs]… in the current funding climate tough choices have to be made” and charging for some HWRC services, is “ultimately better than losing those services altogether”.

This WDA distinction is key, as the two-tier system that is unique to England may be halting progress in other areas. Especially where relationships between waste collection authorities (WCAs) and WDAs are difficult, ‘cost shunting’ between them can occur — which doesn’t help the taxpayer. One local authority source, who did not wish to be named, told us about a neighbouring WCA that had recently ceased a communications campaign with the knowledge that it would reduce its recycling rate because it felt it was not getting any value back from its high recycling performance. Subsequently, the authority’s recycling performance dropped, but residual waste tonnage went up, meaning higher costs for the WDA, where the WCA had saved money.

The same source indicated that such actions could ultimately result in a top-down local government reorganisation, but noted that won’t necessarily happen as it’s not all doom and gloom — to counter the limitations of the two-tier system and reduced budgets, some authorities are finding efficiencies in growing numbers of successful waste partnerships, and trade associations continue to do their best to fill the policy void.

Wales

If we consider the race to zero waste, Wales is in pole position, and has been for a few years. The country first overtook England in recycling performance in 2009/10 and hit 51.5 per cent for the calendar year 2013. In both April-June and July-September 2014, Wales attained the highest recycling rate any region of the UK has ever achieved: an impressive 58 per cent. More importantly, perhaps, residual waste levels have also been falling year on year, and in the summer of 2014, the per capita residual waste figure was 52 kilogrammes (kg) (the target for 2015/16 is for yearly residual waste to drop to 195 kg per person).

Key to this progress is, most likely, a very supportive government that has set ambitious targets and produced guides and materials to help local authorities get there. Unlike England, which is only aiming to achieve the European targets, Wales introduced its own, more ambitious goals in ‘Towards Zero Waste’ in 2010, including achieving 70 per cent recycling by 2025 and reducing waste arisings by about 1.5 per cent each year (on a 2007 baseline) to achieve zero waste (including no energy from waste) by 2050.

The overarching strategy document was followed up with sector guides, with the initial municipal sector plan, released in March 2011, tellingly subtitled ‘Collections Blueprint’. To achieve ‘high rates of high-quality recycling, significant cost savings and improved sustainable development outcomes’, the document recommends a kerbside sort system where the full range of commonly-collected materials, including food waste, is collected in a single pass by a ‘new breed’ of multi-compartmentalised vehicles (though the evidence base for the document is being reviewed to ‘take account of new developments in equipment’). More recently, WRAP Cymru established a framework agreement in which it will act as a central purchasing body to allow authorities to obtain containers to complement the blueprint – specifically promoting either a stackable box system, as is used in Conwy, or a two-box-one-sack system, as is used in Bridgend.

Interestingly, though, despite the administration’s clear preference for kerbside sort, it is Wales’s co-mingled authorities that are, in fact, recording the highest recycling rates. The most recent figures – for summer 2014 – again show Denbighshire (which uses one co-mingled wheelie bin for recyclables and a food waste caddy) recycling the most waste at 66 per cent, followed by Monmouthshire (twin-stream co-mingled bags, again complemented by a food waste caddy) on 65 per cent, Pembrokeshire (orange bags for most recyclables complemented by a separate box for glass since 2012 and a food waste caddy) on 64 and Ceredigion (which doesn’t even collect glass in its single co-mingled bag that, again, goes out with a food waste bin) on 62. The highest performing kerbside sort authority is Conwy – on 59 per cent.

Speaking about this to Resource, Natural Resources Minister Carl Sargeant accepted that co-mingling is currently achieving high rates in parts of Wales, but said there would come a time that these authorities would “start to struggle – either financially or on target issues” and so would “probably have to start coming into line”.

In any case, it is unlikely that the impressive rate of improvement will continue apace in future years, now that the easy win of offering comprehensive kerbside services has been achieved. Sargeant admits that, now that the country has “got the low-hanging fruit”, it will face “some pinch points of moving to the next targets” (whilst also suggesting that there might not be as much money for councils in future years). Key to future improvement will probably be some focus on engagement, as well as joint procurement, though legislation like the Welsh Environment Bill won’t hurt, either. The bill, which is expected to become law in spring 2016, includes proposals to extend European separate collection requirements and ban uncontaminated paper and card, untreated wood, glass, metal, food waste and, most notably, plastic from energy-from-waste facilities (apart from organics to anaerobic digestion, of course!).

Northern Ireland

As the smallest and least urban country of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland has the lowest recycling rate of the lot. But the country has come a long way in the relatively short time it has been recycling. In its first waste management strategy, which was published in 2000, district councils were set the target of recycling and composting 25 per cent of household waste by 2010 – a figure that was amended to 35 per cent after the three waste management partnerships (arc21 – consisting of 11 councils in the east of Northern Ireland; the Northwest Region Waste Management Group; and the Southern Waste Management Partnership (SWaMP)) reported back higher than expected rates.

Further to this, in 2013/14, local authorities for the first time recycled, recovered and composted more than they sent to landfill, with less than 49 per cent of waste going to this disposal route. This achievement has been helped, in part, by the £10-million worth of grants the Department of Environment’s Rethink Waste campaign has provided to businesses wishing to develop or improve recycling infrastructure since 2010.

As well as recycling, the country has also been a champion of fortnightly residual waste collections, with just 1,000 properties having weekly waste collections (unlike in England, where central government ‘champions’ weekly collections), and has also been increasingly focusing on waste prevention. In 2013, Northern Ireland was ranked second out of all of the European countries for the number of waste prevention actions achieved during the European Week for Waste Reduction, and its Single Use Carrier Bags Charge Regulations, which were introduced in 2013 and now cover all bags with a retail value below 20 pence, helped raise £3.4 million for community-based environment projects.

However, things aren’t looking completely rosy for the country, as new data published for the second quarter of 2014/15 shows that, for the first time since 2009/10, the household dry recycling and composting rate failed to show any quarter-on-quarter increase, remaining at just below 46 per cent (101,057 tonnes). This has been attributed to a lack of increase in household composting rates, which have historically driven improvements in overall recycling rates.

Councils have also failed to reach the Northern Ireland Programme for Government milestone target for recycling and composting for two consecutive years, missing the 2013/14 target (43 per cent) by two per cent. This means that councils have a long way to go to achieve the 60 per cent recycling rate target by 2020.

But actions are being taken to boost performance. In January of this year, a new law came into effect requiring local authorities throughout the UK to separately collect dry recyclables where technically, environmentally and economically practicable, and ‘appropriate to meet the necessary quality standards for the relevant recycling sectors’, and the following month The Food Waste Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2015 were laid, requiring all district councils to separately collect food waste from households, banning separately-collected food waste from being sent to landfill, and placing a duty on some businesses to present food waste for separate collection.

Further boosts to recycling are expected now that the 26 councils in Northern Ireland have been streamlined into 11 ‘super councils’, in a bid to offer ‘more efficient and more effective services’. Although no council has yet announced recycling changes (the councils that already knew what the plans were for waste management when Resource contacted them said it would be ‘business as usual’ to ‘minimise any disruption to our residents’), several will introduce organic waste collections and changes to bulky waste collections to ensure residents within the new boundaries are given equal opportunities to recycle. However, now that planning and infrastructure development powers have been devolved from central government to the councils, it is thought that several may develop more waste and recycling facilities, as it will ‘allow local people to influence and make decisions on local business development, infrastructure provision, job creation and economic competitiveness’.

Scotland

Along with Wales, Scotland is often seen as one of the most forward-thinking UK nations when it comes to waste management. But whilst it’s been praised for its ambition to boost recycling, it has also been criticised for failing to reach its targets.

Just nine councils (less than a third) met Scotland’s target to recycle half of their household waste by 2013, with the national recycling rate coming in at 42.2 per cent for 2013, making it the second lowest UK performer – just 0.6 per cent above Northern Ireland. Despite this, the country’s Environment Secretary, Richard Lochhead, has said the Scottish Government makes “no apologies” for the ambitions set in its Zero Waste Plan, and is pushing ahead with its target to recycle 70 per cent of waste in 10 years’ time, as it is “important that the targets … should be genuinely challenging”.

It’s a thought echoed by Lord Deben, former Secretary of State for the Environment for the UK government, and current Chairman of the Climate Change Committee, who said last year: “If you set high standards then you get high standards. Take Scotland, for example, which has set high targets which are very difficult to reach, and hasn’t met for the last two years, but they are a lot further than they would be if they had set a standard which would have been easy to get to.”

Despite missing its ambitious waste targets, Scotland has been steadily making progress in boosting its recycling performance year-on-year, improving by around one per cent a year the past two years (compared to England’s ‘levelling off’ of recycling rates). The government has also been keen to help improve recycling infrastructure in the country, providing
£3.8 million in loans to reprocessors wishing to develop sorting, repairing and reprocessing machinery, and launching a £90,000 capital grant fund for materials recovery facility (MRF) operators to purchase standardised testing equipment to test, monitor and record their material quality.

Further, it has also announced plans to initiate a Materials Brokerage Service next year to ‘see supply and demand for high value recycling matched up’ and ‘help the public sector get a better deal for the recycled materials collected from their communities’. (The plan has also inspired Wales to assess whether a similar service could be introduced there.)

Aside from recycling, the country is also taking waste into it own hands, and has just brought in its own landfill tax, with Revenue Scotland now collecting and managing the new £82.60 tax (or £2.60 for lower rate wastes). This will support the Scottish Landfill Communities Fund (SLCF), which provides funding for community or environmental projects situated within 10 miles of a landfill or waste transfer site.

Looking to waste prevention, the government and the body that delivers its Zero Waste Plan, Zero Waste Scotland, launched a new Scottish Institute of Remanufacture earlier this year, based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. This institute aims to bring together stakeholders from a range of industries to develop ways of improving product design and repairability/ease of disassembly and ‘keep increasingly scarce resources in productive use as long as possible’.

Like the other UK nations, Scotland has also implemented legislation requiring all local authorities to separately collect dry recyclables, and, unlike the other countries has also required businesses to present recycling separately for collection. Moreover, the legislation for councils makes no reference to technical practicability of separate collections, stating that authorities should provide householders with receptacles that will ‘enable the separate collection of dry recyclable waste from the property’ unless said property is in a rural area and the separate collection of dry recyclable waste from the property would not be ‘environmentally or economically practicable’. As such, councils in Scotland have no legal standing for arguing that separate collections are not ‘technically practicable’.

Looking ahead, Scotland is set to bring in a raft of new requirements to boost recycling rates, including: a ban on the incineration of metals and hard plastics; a requirement for local authorities to offer food waste recycling to non-rural areas; a ban on discharging food waste into the public sewer, or sending it to landfill or incineration; and a requirement for more businesses to present food waste for separate collection.

We’ll have to wait and see if these measures finally align the country’s achievements with its ambitions.