by Peter Jones
7 minute readThe publication of the Environment Bill at last gives us a clear picture of the source separation requirements that are likely to apply to food waste in England and Northern Ireland from 2023. If the rules mean what they appear to, they usher in a transformation of the composting and AD market, whose consequences are yet to be fully recognised.
When I last wrote about the emerging policies on organics recycling, I focused on the inconsistent language used about the new source separation rules. They had been described rather differently in the 2019 consultation on waste collection than in the 2018 consultation, and it wasn’t clear what impact a practicability-based exception to the requirement to source separate might have.
TEEPly inclined
S.52 of the Environment Bill defines the source separation requirements regarding both household and commercial waste, which are closely aligned to the proposals in the 2019 consultation.
Under the new rules, generally speaking:
- Recyclable waste (including food waste and – for households – garden waste) must be collected separately from other household waste.
- Recyclable waste must be collected for recycling or composting.
- Recyclable waste in each recyclable waste stream must be collected separately.
However, point 3 above does not apply when source separation isn’t necessary or practicable:
Recyclable… waste in two or more recyclable waste streams may be collected together where—
(a) it is not technically or economically practicable to collect recyclable… waste in those recyclable waste streams separately, or
(b) collecting recyclable… waste in those recyclable waste streams separately has no significant environmental benefit (having regard to the overall environmental impact of collecting it separately and of collecting it together).
Even where this is the case, though, organic wastes must still be collected separately from other wastes. The exception above only concerns whether food waste and garden waste can be collected as a single mixed stream.
Exempt from exemption
The Bill allows ministers to make exemptions to the requirement to collect each stream separately. However, that power does not affect the requirement to separate food waste from non-recyclable waste, and can only be exercised where the minister is satisfied that doing so “will not significantly reduce the potential for recyclable household waste… to be recycled or composted”.
Ministers also have a power to amend the requirement,
“to make provision about the extent to which recyclable household waste… in any of those waste streams may or may not be collected together with recyclable household waste… in another recyclable waste stream.”
Again, this power only relates to the requirement to separate food waste from other organics, and not the requirement to separate it from residual waste.
The only other power ministers have to adjust the proposed rules is through statutory guidance. Again, there is a specific power to address “the circumstances in which it may not be technically or economically practicable to collect recyclable household waste… separately”, but practicability relates only to the separation of recyclable streams from one another, and so ministers don’t seem able to give guidance on where it may not be feasible to separate food waste at all.
Bill of goods?
This is quite encouraging. There is no obvious avenue by which to exclude classes of households (e.g. flats) or businesses from the requirement to source separate, which might undermine the feasibility of reaching the recycling targets. However, this exposition of the Bill’s contents is a preamble to setting out its (perhaps) unforeseen consequences.
For example, the law seems not to allow food waste to be collected in a disposable plastic or paper liner. This would be unfortunate, as various WRAP and Defra studies have found that supplying liners tends to result in greater public participation – although there is a good case for moving toward compostable liners to minimise plastic particles in digestate.
The issue is that food waste must be collected separately from all other waste – but a liner is not food waste. One possible response is that liners aren’t waste, but the Government’s guidance on the definition of waste doesn’t support that. The guidance’s starting point is whether the holder has an “intention to discard the item”. Putting an item out for waste collection is a pretty clear sign of this intent! Another factor is whether the item has been “consigned to an operation which is a common way of disposing of or recovering waste,” which will be true of a food waste liner that enters the recycling stream.
Perhaps there’s an argument to be made based on the “characteristics of the substance or object” – but I see no special characteristics of a liner that would exempt it from being waste. And if it is waste, it must be kept separate from food.
If this argument applies to liners, it applies even more clearly to compostable plastic packaging. At the moment, few if any food waste collection systems are set up to also accept compostable packaging. Generally, it has to be collected separately if it is going to be composted. The new legislation would appear to require that this separation continues: even if a system could be designed that allowed for food waste and compostable plastics to be collected together, it would breach the source separation requirements. The argument would also seem to apply to single use sacks used for dry recycling.
So, the new requirement to source separate is strict, and there seems no way to relax it through regulations or guidance. There seems to be an opportunity here to improve the drafting to avoid unintended consequences: in particular, the law should ensure that compostable food caddy liners (including “improvised” linings, like newspaper) are able to be used.
Industrial unrest
Assuming that the source separation rules are enforced, what will it mean for the organics recycling system? A huge increase in the amount of separately collected food would be a boon to a healthy organics industry, but in a recent presentation, David Newman gave a pretty stark assessment of its current situation:
- Your feedstocks are a mess
- Your gate fees are near to zero
- Your outputs are worthless
- Your business model is unsustainable because it races to the lowest common denominator
It’s easy to understand how the industry reached this point: in order to attract food waste, it needed to offer convenient services, where collection and treatment would be cost competitive with disposal via residual waste. If commercial customers wanted to present food waste still in its packaging – no problem, we can install depackaging equipment. If that meant there were plastic fragments in the output, it wasn’t a problem so long as land could be found on which it could be spread.
The introduction of a requirement to source separate food waste completely changes the dynamic. It will no longer be about using price to lure waste out of the residual stream. Rather, the driver will be legislative (provided that enforcement is up to the job).
The new source separation rules should mean that it is no longer acceptable for packaged food to be presented for collection, removing the need for depackaging at the reprocesssor’s end. A greater emphasis on quality inputs should also mean that there can be a change of focus towards producing high quality digestate and compost that has real agricultural value.
Further, it seems unlikely that the next generation of AD plants will be supported by renewable energy subsidies to the same extent as they have been in the past. Meanwhile, competition for feedstock will be less cutthroat than in recent years. These factors seem likely to combine to increase the cost of anaerobic digestion and composting to well above its current level.
So, while Defra might expect that the main impact of the source separation policy will be on the councils and businesses that don’t currently separate food waste, it may actually have a substantial impact on gate fees across the board. That opens up the question of whether the government’s commitment under the “new burdens doctrine” to fund the local authorities impacted by its new policy will extend to those affected by increased gate fees. If not, the potential unfairness in the treatment of authorities that have already spent money on food waste collections, which I highlighted in my previous blog, will be exacerbated.
While the requirement to source separate food waste is certainly to be welcomed, it is extremely important that Defra, local authorities, waste producers and the food waste management industry rapidly come to grips with the fundamental change this will bring. Otherwise, we risk seeing a policy that is not properly designed to bring about the changes we should want to see: a huge increase in the share of food waste that is treated, and a big improvement in the quality of the resulting outputs, helping to return organic matter to our soils, and sequestering carbon in the process.
Featured image: MPCA Photos (CC BY-NC 2.0), via Flickr.
What has been the impact in terms of AD recyclate quality and gate fees in those areas in the UK and elsewhere which already have mandatory separate collection for food waste?
Hi Shlomo,
Good question. We certainly see big differences between England, Scotland and Wales. England, because of overcapacity and a lack of relevant legislation, has recent local authority gate fees of £0-£23 tonne, according to WRAP data. Scotland and Wales are both rather more expensive – data is a bit scant, but fees around £50/tonne are not uncommon. WRAP’s gate fee info is probably the best source: http://www.wrap.org.uk/collections-and-reprocessing/recovered-materials-markets/reports/gate-fee-reports/2018-report-map
Cheers for the fast response there, Peter. Higher gate fees in Scotland and Wales do seem to support your thesis that mandatory separate collection for AD could increase gate fee prices in England. Presumably over time there will be some levelling out because if gate fees end up making it extremely profitable then it would encourage more capacity to be built. As such, lead-in times could be a relevant factor in terms of how long it takes to get a new AD project from theory to practice and how that relates to when the separate collection requirements will kick in.
Compared to incineration, even £50/tonne is not an unreasonable amount, especially if food waste arisings fall as a result of separate collection as per the WRAP study published in January 2020 at https://wrap.org.uk/content/impact-food-waste-collections-household-food-waste-arisings but it does still raise the reasonable question of who ought to bear that additional burden.
The Government might see their measures of introducing EPR and full cost recovery for packaging etc could help more than compensate for additional costs in other areas, meaning no net additional burden (which would be consistent with what Coffey was saying about the impact of lost revenue to local authorities from plastic bottle recycling due to the deposit return scheme). In that sense, the big issue is councils with inflexible waste contracts which cannot handle a move away from residual waste treatment (i.e. incineration) towards separate collection of food waste, and the extent to which Government will help councils renegotiate or terminate long-term contracts which are no longer fit for purpose or whether the Government will exempt those councils from separate collection requirements.
Hi Shlomo,
I agree – lead times are going to be an issue. For local authorities, it is urgent for the Government to signal when it will start applying the new burdens doctrine, since at the moment it would be daft for a council to introduce a food waste service at its own cost when, by waiting a little, it could get it paid for. The more we compress the time window available for councils to act, the more we will hit limits in the capacity of the AD sector to build new facilities. For the commercial sector, it will be more challenging still. A shortage of treatment capacity will push up gate fees, even if no advances are made on quality.
I considered addressing the EPR question in the article – but it was already longer than I wanted it to be! You could well be right that the government might take the view that EPR money compensates for additional costs in other areas, and that’s entirely true when it comes to the DRS (another new measure). But it can’t offset the unfairness of effectively rewarding the “late adopters” of food waste collections, since all local authorities will benefit from EPR money while only those who do not currently have a food waste collection will benefit under the new burdens doctrine.
You’re right regarding the impact of long-term contracts. Presumably, “new burdens” means that if the requirement to separate food waste leads to contract penalties under restrictive waste treatment contracts, those costs would be covered by Defra. It may well be cheaper to help renegotiate the contracts. But note one of the key points in my article – it seems there’s no provision to exempt authorities from the requirement to separate food waste from residual on grounds of cost, whether under the TEEP test, through guidance or by regulation. The only exemption available is that mixing food and garden may be acceptable – and as I highlighted in my previous article, that option will rarely be lower cost than collecting food separately.
It’s a fascinating set of puzzles…