Tooling up for waste prevention

Waste prevention sits at the very top of the waste hierarchy. By stopping items becoming waste in the first place, we eliminate the need to handle, transport, process and dispose of them. This lessens our impact on the environment – and for local authority waste managers if it takes waste out of the residual stream it brings the double bonus of helping boost the recycling rate while avoiding the costs of waste treatment or disposal.

However, it can be tough for local authorities to make the case for spending money on waste prevention initiatives, even though they are likely to repay the investment. How do you select between the different waste prevention activities that could be tried? How much waste might each prevent? Officers may not have the time and resources to answer some of the questions that colleagues and members would want to ask before signing off on expenditure – and may be focused on efforts to maintain and improve existing kerbside services. So, what are the prospects of moving prevention up the priority list?

Prevent strategy

Boosting the recycling rate is becoming increasingly pressing for the UK. The deadline for reaching the Waste Framework Directive recycling and re-use target of 50% of household waste by 2020 is drawing near and doubts remain regarding whether it can be met. Further ahead, targets under England’s Resources and Waste Strategy are set to escalate by five percentage points every five years, in line with the new Waste Framework Directive. Wales and Scotland continue to press forward at a faster pace.

There’s currently no direct obligation on English local authorities to deliver against this target, and 2017/18 data from Defra and WasteDataFlow shows that 76% were achieving less than the 50% threshold. As the challenge increases, this might change: the Resources and Waste Strategy indicated that the government would consult on introducing “non-binding performance indicators for the quantity of materials collected for recycling”, adding that the indicators would

“consider the different circumstances and potential for higher recycling that local authorities experience and would be reviewed regularly to drive performance.” 

However, the strategy doesn’t give much direct encouragement to local authorities to focus on prevention. Despite numerous mentions of the need for waste prevention, much of the focus is on measures around clothing, food waste businesses and the potential for extended producer responsibility to encourage producers to design out waste.

Nevertheless, for authorities facing challenges in boosting the amount of recycling they collect, and being assessed against new indicators, measures to prevent waste could be an attractive way to increase performance. So, how can they overcome the challenge of making a case for investing in waste prevention measures?

The whole kit and caboodle

Many have turned to Eunomia’s Waste Prevention Toolkit (WPT), which has been downloaded nearly 200 times by public sector users since it was first launched in 2013. The WPT is an easy-to-use Excel model designed to help councils assess the financial and environment impacts of the most common waste prevention initiatives, enabling them to identify, compare and prioritise them.

The user inputs waste data and resource costs, and the model generates environmental and financial impacts based on waste avoided, including the recycling rate uplift. The outputs are designed to support the production of a business case.

The WPT has just been updated, introducing a revised set of environmental assumptions and adding two extra types of initiative to the 10 pre-loaded in the previous version – and the three user-defined scenarios. Based on WRAP data, the new WPT allows the impacts of bulky waste reuse initiatives to be estimated, with separate modules for kerbside and HWRC-based collection systems – each allowing a variety of scenarios, based on WRAP guidance, to be modelled.

Power tool

This is of particular interest given the sheer amount of bulky waste arising in the UK – WRAP calculated that in 2010/2011 local authorities across the UK collected over one million tonnes of bulky waste. Around 40% of this is furniture, and a considerable proportion – up to 50% of that received at HWRCs – has reuse potential. That represents a considerable opportunity for those looking for affordable ways to boost recycling and reuse performance.

As English local authorities grapple with the implications of the waste strategy, and the key role they will have in helping meet the new national targets, cost-effective waste prevention initiatives deserve increased attention. If the government means business when it comes to improving resource efficiency, we should expect to see much more effort going into waste prevention and reuse, and familiarising yourself with the WPT is a great place to start.

Featured image: Ryan Hyde (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Flickr.