EXCLUSIVE: An official scientific report into how the UK can derive value from waste will highlight pay as you throw style solutions, Defra’s chief scientific advisor Professor Ian Boyd has indicated.
The study, ‘From Waste to Resource Productivity’, is to be published by January 2017 and consists of 13 evidence chapters – including a sub-report on food waste reduction.
Defra’s chief scientific advisor Ian Boyd, who has co-authored the report
Professor Boyd spoke earlier this week (December 13) at the All-Party Parliamentary Sustainable Resource Group’s London seminar on ‘Redesigning Waste & Resource Policy Outside the EU’, and shed more light on the likely report contents.
The Defra professor is co-authoring the wide-ranging document alongside the government’s chief scientific advisor Professor Sir Mark Walport.
A range of waste and recycling experts have been asked to write individual chapters of the report such as covering local authorities, the international scene and energy from waste. It will also include evidence submissions on how to increase the value of recycled products from business as well as central and local government.
The local authority sector section has been written by Pat Jennings, head of policy at the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management, which now has former Defra waste chief Colin Church as chief executive and president Margaret Bates who is a supporter of pay as you throw.
‘Social problem’
Professor Boyd told the event: “It is all about materials that have recycled negative value and finding ways of giving them positive value. The process of generating waste is a social problem as much as a science problem.”
He added: “In the future the production of waste will increasingly be concentrated in cities which is challenging but in some cases quite good. Concentrated spaces helps because where waste is more spread out there is a problem because of higher entropy.
“We expect this report to help stimulate future discussion and debate I hope when it is published sometime in early 2017.”
Professor Boyd told letsrecycle.com that the report would look at designing out waste by making materials last longer, as well as at innovation and business models which would focus on consumers “buying services rather than ownership of products”.
This he suggested, would mean looking at collection models where people pay for disposing of the products in order to maintain value. However, he stopped short of endorsing a ‘pay as you throw’ system.
Falbygden biomass plant in Sweden. Professor Boyd has said EfW is not the way forward for the UK
Behaviour
The report will also focus on consumer behaviour, especially in how people generate food waste which will form the basis of a sub-report within the publication launch.
Professor Boyd’s input to the report appeared unsupportive of energy recovery schemes, after delegates questioned how waste to energy featured in the government’s plans for resource policy.
Referring to media reports this week that Sweden’s EfW rollout has solved the country’s waste needs, he said: “Swedish energy from waste is going to suck in waste 40 years before it depreciates and will drive demand for resources. That’s not the solution we need to go for. My feeling is the more we innovate the less and less there will be of those materials. And the more we have of these incinerators the less and less need there is to innovate.”
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Source: letsrecycle.com Waste Managment
