When John Major signed the Maastricht Agreement and committed the UK to the EEC Landfill Directive, he apparently wasn’t aware of the consequences and left the UK waste management industry with the dilemma of meeting very challenging landfill waste diversion targets by 2020.
The UK’s hostility to energy from waste plants meant the only feasible option was to introduce Landfill Tax (making the cost of waste disposal so high that recycling became feasible) coupled with new arrangements where householders would sort out recyclate for separate kerbside collections. Fortnightly collections of residual waste were introduced (now every three weeks in some council areas) to encourage householders to maximise the amounts of recyclate they’d sort out.
As householders had enjoyed generous waste collection services for decades, it wasn’t easy and most councils "converted" their existing collection routes gradually over many months. It still didn’t prevent collection crews from being physically and verbally abused, and councillors’ surgeries rammed with angry constituents, all of whom felt they were "special cases" and not helped by some tabloid media who assured their readers that "the council must collect your rubbish every week".
But over time it settled down and Scotland soon became the UK leader, with recycling levels rising to 45% by 2007. There were stable markets for selling recyclate, the income used to offset collection costs. That the rate of increase stalled after 2008 was solely due to political intervention.
However, the proposed Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) would change all that.
Most of the containers captured by the new DRS would be product already being collected by the councils. Any drop in these tonnages means reduced income from recyclate sales and at least one council anticipates that this will make it uneconomical to continue with separate kerbside collections for glass, plastics and cans. Householders who are unable to get their containers to a location where refunds are available will then have to put these in their residual waste bin.
Setting aside the issue of their deposits being "lost" (actually a cornerstone of Circularity Scotland’s Business Plan), a reduction in the council’s recycling rate, and increased waste disposal and landfill tax costs, will some householders now expect either additional residual waste bins or increased collection frequencies?
When we introduced wheeled bins in Scotland in the 1980/90s, waste collection round tonnages increased by up to 20% so handing out extra bins nowadays would probably have the same effect.
And if it came to that, all the upheaval and grief endured in 2000-05 to advance Scotland’s waste diversion and recycling achievements would then have been a complete waste of time and effort. On April 18 the First Minister announced he was postponing the DRS until March next year. The next day a further "tweak" of the DRS was announced.
Ideally DRS should be postponed indefinitely. (And DRS won’t make any difference to our litter problems).
The author spent several decades in the Scottish waste management industry
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