Oral evidence: Waste management, HC 241Wednesday 25 June 2014

Oral evidence, 25 June 2014.

Witnesses

Daniel Smyth, Senior Director, RPS Planning and Development, Shlomo Dowen, Secretary and National Coordinator, UK Without Incineration Network, and Julie Hill, Associate and former Director, Green Alliance, gave evidence.

Chair

Thank you very much to the gentlemen and lady for being with us this afternoon and contributing to our inquiry. For the record, could I ask you to introduce yourselves, perhaps starting with the lady on my left?

Julie Hill

Julie Hill. I am an associate to Green Alliance and I chair the Circular Economy Task Force.

Daniel Smyth

I am Dan Smyth. I am a senior director at RPS Planning and Development.

Shlomo Dowen

Shlomo Dowen, the national coordinator of the United Kingdom Without Incineration Network.

Chair

Where you agree please do not feel that you have to contribute. It is probably more where you disagree and you have got something different to say it would be helpful. How do you consider the Government’s approach over the last four years in regards to waste management? Do you believe that the Government has given a coordinated and consistent message in regard to waste management policy?

Julie Hill

No, I do not think it has given a coordinated and consistent message. The work Green Alliance has been doing with our task force, which is a consortium of businesses from across the supply chain, to move forward a conversation about the circular economy, is trying to take a much more holistic view. It marries up looking at municipal waste with commercial industrial waste. That is a false distinction, really, to separate those waste streams. They are quite often the same materials with the same properties and the same potential. It also looks across the UK, whereas we are beginning to see divergent policies in different parts of the UK, which is useful if it generates competition for excellence but not very useful for businesses who go across the divide. We are also increasingly trying to get a more holistic sense of how we organise—

Chair

Can we keep the answers fairly short, please? Anybody else want to contribute?

Daniel Smyth

I would just add that I agree. In certain areas the government leadership has been very good, in other areas not quite so good and not consistent across the board. There is evidence that Government does not fully understand and appreciate the whole lifecycle concept and the whole circular-economy concept. That is an area for more work.

Shlomo Dowen

The question includes the word “consistency” and I will just focus on the inconsistencies of Government. You have got the pro-recycling message that is being undermined by perverse financial incentives to incinerate and combust material that should not be. You have Defra talking about the waste hierarchy while at the same time Government is providing subsidies for gasification plants that are so inefficient they sit at the very bottom of the waste hierarchy along with landfill. You have Defra talking about the waste hierarchy while at the same time Government is providing subsidies for gasification plants that are so inefficient they sit at the very bottom of the waste hierarchy along with landfill. Similarly, DECC talks about decarbonisation of the energy supply and yet Government is paying subsidies for incinerators that will emit 10 times the amount of grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. It is worse than coal-fired power stations. When it comes to planning, the Department for Communities and Local Government allows planning consent for incinerators that go against Government policies on climate change, energy efficiency and waste hierarchy. These all seem like inconsistencies to our members.

Chair

Each of you, what do you believe the role of Government should be in waste management policy? Do you believe that this is a time that the Government should be stepping back from its role in waste management policy?

Shlomo Dowen

First of all, Government, and in particular Defra, should be shifting their focus from avoiding landfill to avoiding residual waste. I was glad to hear some of my colleagues saying that today. Even if Defra did limit itself to clear market failures, it has a lot of work to do. Defra acknowledges that government intervention is needed to prioritise reuse and recycling over incineration, and that government intervention is needed to ensure the full cost of incinerating plastics, for example, is reflected in the price of incineration. There is still a lot to be done even if we just limit ourselves to market failures. In addition, it is only fair that Defra should help out local authorities that they have led down the garden path into signing long‑term waste management contracts that those local authorities now feel are bad deals. I think it is only right that Defra should help them out.

Daniel Smyth

There are some obvious areas where there is a role for Government—recycling targets, for example. There is evidence from the most recent Defra statistics that the 50% diversion by 2020 is at risk, so there is an area where support is required. We have heard about leadership. We have heard about communications and the importance of getting communications right all the way through the system. There is a role for Government to play in terms of encouraging certain technologies that are economically marginal, to continue driving waste management up the hierarchy, and again to encourage specific types of gasification, for example. There are lots of different kinds of gasification: some of them only generate electricity as an output; others are looking at generating synthesis gas or synthesis fuels. To achieve that, encouragement is required from Government.

Julie Hill

I think there are three main areas. One is to set strategic direction for the circular economy, and that means making it as much an economic goal to capture value of resources as an environmental goal. The second is to intervene in the design of products. We heard a lot about that from the previous three witnesses. You cannot get stuff back unless it is designed to have the product or material recovered. The third is to get the right infrastructure. You also heard that from the previous three witnesses. We have bottlenecks in the provision of not just sorting but reprocessing infrastructure, because there are supply‑side and demand‑side problems, which we can go further into, but we have a gap.

Ms Ritchie

Under existing policies, will England reach the EU household waste recycling target of 50% by 2020?

Julie Hill

I would defer to the knowledge of my industry colleagues in the first session, and also very much WRAP—the Waste and Resources Action Programme—who I think you are hearing from later, that the consensus is probably not.

Daniel Smyth

I would agree that there is a risk that we will not meet that target. The evidence is quite clear. Again, I have little to add to what has been said previously.

Shlomo Dowen

I will remind everyone that 70 English local authorities are already recycling more than 50%. However, if we do miss the target I would suggest that is because local authorities have focused too much on incineration and not enough on recycling.

Ms Ritchie

If not, what actions should be taken to address any anticipated short fall?

Shlomo Dowen

Very simple, as others have said. Make sure that food waste moves from the residual stream to the recycling stream, so that no food waste is incinerated or landfilled. Also support local authorities to extend the range of materials accepted for recycling. Echoing what was said about a wider range of plastics—simply put, if a consumer purchases plastic it should be recyclable. If it cannot be put in the recycle bin, they should not be able to buy it. It should not be available.

Daniel Smyth

Again, a product-lifecycle approach in terms of design, so that you are designing to be able to recycle products. We heard about composites and the problems that composites create. In terms of recycling, many recycling processes work on physical systems, so magnets, electrical current, and density. It is very difficult to do that when you have composite materials, mixed materials and contaminated materials. Product design and also separate collection systems, so that you are not cross-contaminating materials and you cannot recycle them as a consequence, and then investment in infrastructure.

Julie Hill

Exactly the same things. Without the infrastructure you cannot push up the rates, and you have got to do something about the demand side so that there is somewhere for the products in that reprocessing infrastructure to go.

Ms Ritchie

Will there be a clear market failure if EU targets are increased to 70% by 2030, as indicated by the EU Commissioner?

Julie Hill

Do you mean a market failure as in the current instruments not doing what they are meant to do? Yes, it probably indicates that the landfill tax ought to have been higher to start to build those incentives. However, it is the bottleneck, and the availability of the recycling and reprocessing infrastructure, that is going to be the difficulty. The market failures there are multiple.

Daniel Smyth

I would simply agree.

Shlomo Dowen

We are 15 or 16 years away from 2030. That is wonderful because that gives us time to move from incineration subsidies to incineration taxes, to invest more in recycling infrastructure and education, to do more to ensure separate food collections and collections of other bio-waste and to require the removal of all recyclables prior to incineration or landfill. Government can lead by example through green procurement, etc. We have got the time to do it. The solutions are there; it is just a matter of implementing them.

Mrs Glindon

Do you agree that it is not possible to recycle all materials that enter the waste stream?

Julie Hill

First of all, can I say that we also need to think about product? One of the big gaps is we tend to think about recycling, which means individual materials and therefore a need to reprocess them. The circular economy is about recovering product, so that is about reparability, upgradeability and so you can ensure reuse. It is also, as some of the earlier witnesses said, about extended product lifetime. It is about keeping resources in use. In a sense, recycling and reprocessing, which is what we do with most of municipal waste, is the least environmentally beneficial to do and often represents the least good-value capture from those things. We have got to stop just thinking about household waste and recycling, and think about resource capture in as whole a product form as we can manage.

Daniel Smyth

I would just add that it is not possible to infinitely recycle all materials. At some point the material is no longer recyclable, so you cannot do it forever. The idea is to prolong its use and to use it as much as possible, but you cannot do that forever.

Shlomo Dowen

I was watching the evidence you received a fortnight ago from my colleague, Steve Lee, and he was talking about greasy pizza boxes and how that could make them totally unrecoverable as cardboard. However, what he failed to explain is that cardboard decomposes and so that greasy pizza box could go into the compost and then it would actually count towards recycling. There are a lot of materials that, with creativity, etc, can actually be recycled. Again, it is a matter of removing the perverse disincentives to do that. Obviously, there are members of the chartered institute that would love to get their hands on that pizza box because it provides incinerator feedstock; I would rather see it composted. There is no way you are going to be able to prevent grease from going from the pizza to the box, so use it otherwise.

Jim Fitzpatrick

You heard the discussion we were having earlier on about a business-led approach rather than a Government-led approach. Is that preferable and does it inevitably mean that it will be the lowest-cost option, because it is business-led rather than Government-led, at the expense of the best environmental option?

Julie Hill

No, not at all. I think what you heard from the previous three witnesses is that the industry, or the resource recovery part of industry certainly, is way ahead of Government in this field. That is in terms of its vision and its desire for a long-term solution, its recognition of resources as having value, not just the need to deal with a waste problem and reduce environmental impact. It has been the industry that has recognised the carbon benefits of reuse and recycling, so it is way ahead. As some of those witnesses said, other businesses—the businesses they serve—also want that kind of approach. That is what our task force tells us: they want a circular economy and the Government is not giving it to them.

Daniel Smyth

I agree. It depends on the kind of business, of course. In terms of the waste management sector as a business type, absolutely it is a highly innovative business. It is coming up with great solutions in terms of recovering values from material, and it is doing that across different streams and across products. Some of the work that has been done is fantastic. Obviously the business in the private sector managing its own waste streams will have a tendency to look at the lowest-cost legally compliant disposal solution. They will have a tendency to do that. However, there are other businesses—some of the food retailers, for example—where it makes a lot of sense for them to recover value from that material themselves. It contributes to their corporate social reporting outlook, it recovers energy and it saves cost. It depends on the kind of business. There are some very natural incentives for many businesses but for a significant proportion those costs are what they are looking for.

Shlomo Dowen

It is very important for Government to ensure that the incentive hierarchy matches the waste hierarchy. At the moment it does not, and that is where a lot of the problems stem from. Business cannot realign the incentive hierarchy to the waste hierarchy, but Government can, so that is a job to be done. There are market failures that need to be addressed so there is work for Government to do, whatever business is doing. Government is needed to address the market failures, to ensure the true costs and benefits are reflected in the price of treatment. That is one of the reasons that UKWIN advocates for an incineration tax to help restore the balance.

Jim Fitzpatrick

You heard me ask about messaging, and there was agreement in the previous panel about the messaging having to be continuous and consistent from the private sector, from local government and from Government. Is the average householder as informed as they ought to be to participate in that which we all want to see be a success? What more could be done to get them onside, given that we want to make it as simple as possible, but sometimes simple is not necessarily the best way to do it.

Julie Hill

We heard earlier that WRAP has had a very big role in successful campaigns, but what we also understand is you have to keep repeating it. The messages and communications have to keep coming forward. As soon as they stop people are liable to slip back into previous habits.

Jim Fitzpatrick

Bad habits.

Julie Hill

Yes, non-participation, perhaps. We need to drive up a number of things. We need to drive up participation, so people using the systems at all. We have got to get them using it better, so they are not contaminating streams because, as the re-processors will tell you, purity and certainty is everything. Let us not again forget the business and commercial waste that, if we had a more rational system, local authorities could perhaps begin to collect, and capture the value for that. There is almost no messaging to businesses, other than where they are contracting waste services. Householders in a sense are a captive audience for the local authorities; they have to provide that service. Nothing makes small business listen to messaging about the potential of recycling, or the potential even of getting money back. I am sure that you have heard that household waste is probably a ninth of the total availability of resources we could get back in this country.

Daniel Smyth

Householders do want to do the right thing. They understand that there is value in the material that they throw away. It does need to be kept simple. They do not know where that stuff goes. You do not know where that stuff is going on a street‑by‑street basis. There is more information that can usefully be provided to people so that they understand what the consequences of their actions are and what the benefits are. There is a largely fairly well informed population, but of course I agree it needs to be repeated and it needs to be kept clear. There is also a proportion that does not perform as well, and that needs work.

Shlomo Dowen

Householders need educating, they need reminding; so do product designers and manufacturers. I think that point is made. Places with the best recycling rates often have variable charging schemes. That is something to consider. It makes sense for those sending less to the residual stream to pay less for their waste management. Recycling should be easy, but convenience should not come at the expense of quality. So mixed waste bins where all the plastics go in misses an opportunity because people can appreciate that by further segregating their plastics they are actually doing an even more noble thing than just putting them all in together. People will respond to that. Much more can be done to make recycling both easier and cheaper. For example, if someone brings a reusable item to a bring site it should be accepted for reuse. At the moment you have this whole network of household waste recovery centres but, for various reasons, a lot of it to do with statistics kept by the waste company who is the subcontractor, once you have brought it in it never goes out. So with a perfectly good children’s bicycle that is brought to a bring site, they used to have a stack of them and then someone would come and then they would take them away. Now you cannot have that reuse. That is a missed opportunity. Similarly, bulky collections from local authorities, like furniture collected by local authorities, could be reused, and instead that is not happening yet. There is more that can be done, and obviously it is catchy. Again, it is good for business: if people know that their old settee will be reused by someone who is less fortunate, they may be more inclined to buy a new one, etc. So while I do not promote waste, I am looking to promote reuse.

Neil Parish

Following on from Jim Fitzpatrick, should compulsory household recycling be explored as an option to increase England’s recycling rates?

Julie Hill

We have previously advocated “pay as you throw” rather than compulsory recycling. The policing of that can be very tricky. “Pay as you throw” is either a penalty or an incentive, depending on which way you look at it. It is often misinterpreted as meaning you pay to get rid of everything, rather than the principle that you pay for residual waste, so you pay for what you do not put in the recycling. You escape the charge by recycling. That bit of simple logic seems to escape an awful lot of, dare I say it, politicians, who treat pay as you throw as something that means you pay for everything you throw. You do not; you only pay if you fail to recycle. In my book, that is an incentive rather than a penalty. There is plenty of research work that shows it works in other countries. Obviously other countries are sometimes different culturally, but there is enough to suggest that it might work here. As I am sure you know, ideas about direct household instruments have been very much off the agenda in this administration, but if we are going to reopen that debate I think “pay as you throw” would be the thing to consider first. Now we have the technology for it as well. The Daily Mail does not like it but eventually they will get over it.

Neil Parish

Not necessarily.

Daniel Smyth

I agree with everything that has just been said. I do not think that a compulsory process is going to be popular. I think that incentivisation using intelligent mechanisms and technology is a much better way forward.

Neil Parish

You were saying, Ms Hill, that if you put more into the recycling then you will have less waste and so you will pay less for disposing of that. How would that be measured practically? Are they going to go around and weigh how much you have got in your waste bin, or will they go by the size of the bin? How would that work?

Julie Hill

There are a variety of means. Again, I would defer to my colleagues in the industry but chipped bins, as you have probably heard of, are there to weigh the bin. So the bin goes onto the lorry, the residual waste bin, and the weight is recorded and charged accordingly, or you can do it on size of bin. In some countries they have managed to get the size of the residual waste bin down to half or a third of the ones that we have.

Neil Parish

Keep Britain Tidy has suggested perhaps a reward scheme where you actually reward a community, planting trees or producing a playground or whatever. How practical is that?

Julie Hill

I do not think it would have the same effect.

Neil Parish

Do you not think that people do not necessarily like Big Brother watching them all the time and being told what to do?

Julie Hill

We pay on metres for energy and water. I do not see the difference in paying for disposal of the parts of the waste stream that cannot be recycled. It puts a lot of pressure back on the producers of, say, unrecyclable packaging, to alter that. The manufacturer or retailer who gives you the unrecyclable silver foiled, plastic laminated cat food pouch is also then making you pay for it.

Shlomo Dowen

I think that it is a matter of fairness, in answer to the question. It would be fair to expect someone sending less residual waste to pay less. Similarly, it would be fair for someone who chooses to opt out of recycling to compensate for the environmental damage that they have chosen to cause by opting out. It would not be fair to punish someone who fails to recycle properly if the reason that they have not is because the council does not provide adequate facilities and adequate education.

Neil Parish

What about the person who says, “I have paid for my waste collection through my council tax”?

Shlomo Dowen

Indeed. The amount of council tax that you are charged depends on how much the waste collection and the disposal costs the local authority. How something is collected affects the price of how much it costs to dispose, and so if the way that it is collected means that there are discounts in the disposal costs, those discounts should go back to you. That seems perfectly fair.

Roger Williams

Can I just ask you whether you support or oppose the use of incineration as a waste management technique, and why? Not too long.

Daniel Smyth

It depends what you mean by “incineration”. Incineration without energy recovery is disposal, so it is already recognised in the waste hierarchy as being lower than energy recovery, which is generation of electricity and/or heat. I support the recovery of energy from waste for residual waste, which is the waste that you are not able to do something more constructive with by recycling or reusing it.

Shlomo Dowen

UKWIN opposes gasification, pyrolysis and incineration of all forms—conventional incineration. Incineration is a waste of money. Even if incineration was safe, and we argue that it is not, it would still not be sensible. Incineration harms recycling, destroys valuable resources, results in the release of greenhouse gases and other harmful emissions and simply is not needed. Incineration is a threat to long-term decarbonisation of the electricity supply, as we mentioned earlier. The alternatives to incineration are cheaper, more flexible, better for the environment, better for the economy, giving rise to more jobs and better use of resources. Incineration has no place in a closed‑loop circular zero-waste low-carbon economy.

Chair

Mr Dowen, I think you are actually reading out a statement. We would quite like you reply to the question.

Shlomo Dowen

This is the question about whether I support the use of incineration and why.

Chair

Yes, and perhaps you could explain why.

Shlomo Dowen

The answer is “no”. As I say, incineration is linear: you start off with a product, you burn it, and it is no longer there. It goes against the circular economy. Just to sum up, I will quote William Neale, our UK person at the European Commission: “We have to have a circular economy concept, so it is highly important that we are pumping back materials into the economy rather than burning or burying them”—straightforward.

Roger Williams

Ms Hill, as well as answering that, we have heard from Mr Dowen that he believes that incineration causes lower rates of recycling. Perhaps you could deal with that.

Julie Hill

Our issue would be where it diverted from recycling, the circumstances of which maybe is different, and because you are trying to be quick I will not go into them.

Roger Williams

We have heard in our last evidence session that this plant is highly regulated to protect the environment and to protect the health of people. What are your main concerns about the environmental and health impacts of incinerators?

Shlomo Dowen

There is not enough monitoring, not enough enforcement and not enough transparency. Incinerator operators are not being given any limits to the climate change emissions that they can release into the atmosphere. In fact, harmful emissions of greenhouse gases are not currently regulated at all. At the moment, whatever monitoring and regulating does occur in relation to other harmful incinerator emissions, neither the Environment Agency nor the incinerator operators have adequately opened up this process for public scrutiny. Incinerator operators and the Environment Agency rarely provide online emissions data, annual monitoring reports, permits, permit applications, R1 calculations, decision documents, compliance assessment reports and so forth, even when this information supposedly constitutes part of the so-called public register. When the industry and the regulators appear so reluctant to be open, it is not surprising that people suspect that they may have something to hide.

Julie Hill

As a former member of the board of the Environment Agency, I have more confidence than Mr Dowen in the regulation, but if it is perceived to not be open and transparent I think that needs addressing.

Daniel Smyth

I disagree with pretty much everything that Mr Dowen said. It is a highly regulated industry. The Environment Agency has very significant powers to regulate. They do require monitoring. There is effectively a cap on greenhouse gas emissions from these facilities. I will not go through every point.

Chair

Mr Dowen, do you have a view as to why it is so popular in Scandinavia, Austria and Germany?

Shlomo Dowen

It is not anymore. The latest national resources strategy is subtitled, “Recycle more, incinerate less”. Its popularity is on the wane. It was once popular, and you are not wrong.

Chair

Why is it so acceptable, then? I did not ask about this country. I asked about Scandinavia.

Shlomo Dowen

No, this is Denmark. Denmark’s national resource strategy is subtitled, ‘Recycle more, incinerate less.’

Chair

Because they were not recycling at all?

Shlomo Dowen

Because of incineration, because they were incinerating more than 50% of their waste.

Chair

Because the community has benefited.

Shlomo Dowen

Because historically, it was seen as a good idea.

Chair

If you get a community benefit—you could say it was a sweetener—like providing cheaper hot water and cheaper electricity, that was probably why it was acceptable. Do you say that is a bad thing?

Shlomo Dowen

I am aware of anti-incineration movements throughout Europe. There is Zero Waste Europe, and within each European country there are campaigners against incineration. To say that it is accepted is the same as what the Canadians are being told: that incineration is acceptable in the UK.

Chair

Are you Canadian?

Shlomo Dowen

No. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. You have picked up on my accent there, which I was not trying to hide, but no. Many years living in Yorkshire helped to calm my accent down, and now I live in Nottinghamshire.

Chair

Were you involved in the Dalton Incinerator Steering Committee (DISC)?

Shlomo Dowen

No, but I do know about your shampoo experience from David Andrews. I was not directly involved in DISC. When I lived in Yorkshire, I lived in Bridlington, which is outside of your constituency, but not far away. However, the long and short of it is that when it comes to the popularity with the public of incineration, clearly, that is not something that is ever going to happen in the UK. It is too late with the history of incineration in this country, and the fact that, if you like, we are moving towards the age of decommissioning of incinerators. In Rotterdam, whether they love their incinerator or not, because of overcapacity in Germany—

Chair

I think the rest of the panel probably do not agree with you but I am going to turn to Mr Parish.

Neil Parish

I think I have a fairly good idea of what one member of the panel believes about my question, which is: should there be a moratorium or a ban on new incinerators being built, and why? Could we have a fairly short answer, Mr Dowen, please, on that one?

Shlomo Dowen

I will be as short as I can: yes, we support a moratorium on new incinerators, including gasification and pyrolysis. We need to focus on the top tiers of the waste hierarchy. Incineration is a costly distraction from that. Incinerators are a problem, not a solution. It will only become more problematic as waste arising to—

Chair

Mr Dowen, if you are going to read it out, you might as well just submit it as evidence.

Neil Parish

I think I understand your argument.

Shlomo Dowen

Simply put, there is too much focus on incineration, not enough on the top tiers of the waste hierarchy.

Neil Parish

Ms Hill?

Julie Hill

There will probably always be a fraction of waste that are not recyclable or recoverable, and if you can get energy out of it, that is a better thing to do than to stick it in a hole in the ground.

Neil Parish

That is the other part of my question: should there be a ban on certain types of waste, for example, food or plastics being sent to incinerators?

Chair

Mr Parish, do you want to hear from Mr Smyth?

Neil Parish

I thought I would give them the second part of the question, as well. Should there be a ban on certain types of waste—for example, food or plastics—being sent to incinerators?

Julie Hill

I would like to buy into the picture that the colleagues from the waste industry painted earlier that they could genuinely organise the system so that only unrecoverable wastes go to energy-from-waste, or landfill if that is unavailable. If that is not the path that we seem to be going down, it may be necessary to look at bans to divert to recycling. I would hope that that could be organised through incentives for recycling and reprocessing infrastructure, rather than disincentivising or directly banning what goes on at the bottom end of the hierarchy. If it does not happen, we ought to consider that.

Neil Parish

Mr Smyth?

Daniel Smyth

A ban is an extremely blunt tool. You heard Mr Palmer-Jones earlier saying that, actually, some flexibility—bearing in mind that we are talking about a whole system here, and bearing in mind that in terms of incineration we are talking about infrastructure that is there to deal with residual waste, so again, it is what is left after you have done all the recycling you can do. It complements recycling. It sits within the waste hierarchy. You should make it as efficient as you can, and that can be done within industrial CHP schemes. It is more difficult with schemes that require a district heating system because of variable demand for the heat. However, in my view, it has a place. It is important. The flexibility is required, and a ban is the path of least intelligence.

Shlomo Dowen

I have two more quick points, just to answer your question. One is that if we look at different local authorities, Sheffield is recycling 28%. Why? Because it has an incinerator. It has to feed the monster, so even materials that clearly are recyclable and compostable are going to the incinerator.

Neil Parish

What about the materials that are not? You cannot recycle them. The resources you would use to recycle them are actually greater than what it would be to incinerate it. You are closing your mind entirely to incineration.

Shlomo Dowen

I started off very open‑minded about incineration and did a bit of research.

Neil Parish

With respect, you do not come over as such.

Shlomo Dowen

I have not always been the national coordinator of UKWIN, and I applied for the job because I believed in it. I believed in it because I did my research. Some of the things that I found out are, for example, if you put plastics in the ground, it acts as a carbon sink, so it stores in the carbon in the plastic in the ground; it does not release it into the environment. Secondly, plastics in the ground can then be recycled later, so it is not considered to be economic to recycle that plastic now but it will be in the future. As we heard this morning, what was not economically recyclable five years ago can now be recycled economically. So five years from now, who knows what the range of plastics will be?

Neil Parish

So therefore you would increase landfill until you get to the stage where you actually want to do something else with it.

Shlomo Dowen

Landfill or storage of—

Chair

Are we storing it now? Who would pay for the storage?

Shlomo Dowen

I do not know if you are familiar with landfill mining but landfill mining digs up landfills because the plastics that are there in the ground have a value, and therefore old landfills are being dug up. In effect, that material has been stored there in the landfill.

Neil Parish

I think my last question has more or less been answered. What is the alternative to incineration? Is the alternative a good value-for-money option? Surely, you have got to balance the two. Is incineration cost‑effective? If you are going to use more resource to recycle something, then surely incineration is not all wrong. If you are going to use the hot water in the houses, surely that is quite a good use. There is much more being done on the continent with that. I am just not quite so convinced that incineration does not play a role.

Julie Hill

Large incinerators are very big bits of capital asset, so it depends what you mean by “cost‑effective”. They are possibly now low‑risk assets, because they are proven technology and people can see a role for them, but the risk of not having the supply, as we have seen from the European experience where there is overcapacity and now they are taking our waste to incinerate is quite a big risk. Is that a risk we want to run? Overcapacity is the worst thing we can do for the circular economy. That does not necessarily mean that incineration or energy recovery does not have some role, but my feeling is that it needs to be smaller, more flexible and able to adapt to changing waste streams. It really has to deal with the genuinely residual and not take or divert recyclables.

Daniel Smyth

Just in terms of overcapacity, it is particularly unlikely that a private sector will deliver overcapacity. It is not likely that banks will fund overcapacity where they cannot see that the feed stock is available over the period over which they are making their investment. There are lots of checks and balances to prevent overcapacity. We have just heard that one of the alternatives to incineration is landfill and landfill mining. Landfill is an alternative. Some streams, with better source segregation, better collection and better technology can be driven up the waste hierarchy. With cross-contaminated material that is residual, incineration with energy recovery is a perfectly reasonable, safe, and legally compliant technology and has a place.

Chair

Mr Dowen, briefly?

Shlomo Dowen

I am just looking to see us all move forward rather than backwards. Incineration seems very backward-looking. We are looking to move forward to a closed-loop circular economy. There is nothing circular about an incinerator: you have a resource; you burn it; it is gone. I would like to see all the variety of circular economy approaches—zero‑waste approaches, if you like—applied instead of a single further tonne of incinerator capacity.

Ms Ritchie

Is there a risk that landfill bans could simply lead to an increase in incineration and if so, how could this outcome be avoided?

Julie Hill

Again, by getting the capacity in for recycling. I think it would not be good enough to ban landfill without providing an alternative. As has been said, it is a blunt instrument. It may force things down the hierarchy but you want to know where you want that material to end up, and our view is that we need a rational system where you have designed it according to the needs of the re-processors, which in turn meet the needs of manufacturers.

Daniel Smyth

Some material needs to go to landfill. It is not appropriate for recycling; it is not appropriate for energy recovery, so there will always be a need for some material to go to landfill and there will be a need for landfill into the future. We heard the sensible approach and the business approach is to retain a strategic network of landfill to provide that service. So I can see circumstances where it would be highly problematic invoking a ban on landfill or incineration. When you think about the cross-contamination materials, if you have a cross-contaminated plastic that is banned from incineration, where does it go? A ban is a blunt instrument. I think much more intelligent mechanisms through incentives and encouraging streams up the hierarchy and into other technologies is a better approach.

Shlomo Dowen

On its own, landfill bans do not promote recycling. Our written evidence, particularly section 7, gives a lot of information about what UKWIN thinks should happen with materials, etc. Simply put, there is the vacuum-cleaner effect, as it is called in Europe, where if you ban the landfill but do not give further instructions, you are only driving it one rung up. Not all incineration even fits into that rung, but the best incinerators are still worse than the worst form of recycling. So you want to have more measures, whether they are taxes, incentives, or bans to help drive waste management up the waste hierarchy. Really, we want to start at the top, promoting reduction, reuse, and recycling, rather than starting from a landfill‑diversion mindset. That is part of the change I would like to see.

Ms Ritchie

Recent reports have indicated that the European Commission plans to ban the landfilling of all recoverable municipal waste by 2030. Is this an achievable target in England, Mr Dowen?

Shlomo Dowen

It is achievable, but it could come at the expense of the top tiers of the waste hierarchy, so government intervention would be needed alongside the European initiative in order to make sure that in the UK, the right things happen to that material, not just avoiding one of several clusters of wrong things.

Daniel Smyth

We heard from Mr Cooke earlier that it is achievable with the right support, leadership from Government and framework in terms of developing the necessary solutions.

Julie Hill

I would agree with that.

Chair

One of the greatest difficulties is disposing of wooden frames and other materials left out of buildings. They are being stored at many sites retaining waste, and I had a second fire in Thirsk, at a yard there. How do you see this problem of removing combustibles and disposing of them in the speediest possible way to reduce the risk of fires?

Shlomo Dowen

It falls outside of my expertise, specifically. Obviously I agree with you that fires are a problem and they certainly are distressing for people. Regulation in the Environment Agency—regulation of the industry—is very important. For people to regain confidence, obviously, the Environment Agency needs to regulate.

Daniel Smyth

We heard from the previous witnesses that there is an issue in terms of regulation and in terms of some of the operators in business that do not comply with the regulations. There is a difficulty of enforcement for the Environment Agency with these kinds of operators, so that is an issue, as well as the segregation of material and the design of facilities. Probably the biggest problem here is waste crime, essentially.

Julie Hill

I have nothing to add.

Chair

If there was one recommendation you would make for a better waste management policy, what would it be?

Shlomo Dowen

To recognise that incineration has no place in the circular economy by introducing an immediate moratorium on new incineration capacity and by launching a consultation on, effectively, an exit strategy for incineration.

Daniel Smyth

We have a set of recommendations in our evidence. If I could choose two of those, as I have already said, there is a role for Government in terms of targets that are at risk in terms of the development of the infrastructure that we require to recover more value from material. In particular, I would like to recommend the micro-scale analysis of gasification technology, where that is supported to generate vehicle fuel and gas as a replacement, rather than simply electricity.

Chair

I am sure you will have a long conversation with Mr Dowen after this meeting. Ms Hill?

Julie Hill

The simplest single instrument is individual producer responsibility for products put on the market throughout their entire lifecycle.

Chair

It has been a very lively panel. We are extremely grateful for you for being so open and honest with your answers and sparing the time for being with us this afternoon. Thank you for contributing to our inquiry. Oral evidence: Waste management HC 241 27