By John Crawford

THESE days, it’s difficult to find a technical paper or article about the environment that doesn’t mention "the circular economy". The University of Exeter has set up a Centre for the Circular Economy and appointed a Professor of Circular Economy. The Chartered Institute of Waste Management (which when I joined 50 years ago was called the Institute of Public Cleansing) has now retitled its bi-monthly Journal as Circular to get the message across. We now have many consultancies earning a tidy living advising everybody how to cope with the circular economy, never mind the Government-sponsored WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and Zero Waste Scotland, spending a fortune exhorting us to sign up for it.

But what exactly does the term "the circular economy’ mean? The most succinct definition I’ve found so far is "an approach that aims to gradually decouple growth from the consumption of finite resources". I don’t have a problem with that aspiration, but struggle to reconcile it with the realities of life in the UK today.

Anybody who watched the BBC Disclosure programme in January now knows that the illegal disposal of waste in the UK is a multi-million-pound industry with more than 230 rogue waste disposal sites in Scotland alone. Around 17 organised crime groups are believed to be involved. Fly-tipping in Scotland is at the highest levels most of us can ever remember with our councils seemingly incapable of getting it under control. Clearly the circular economy message isn’t having much impact in that arena.

But even in the legitimate sector, we’re not doing too well. Mobile phones are consuming some of the planet’s scarcest resources at frightening rates, yet most days, TV adverts encourage us to replace our perfectly functional version with a newer model. We’re landfilling millions of disposable nappies every year but nobody seems bothered that it will take until 2099 (or maybe longer) for these to decompose. Whenever plans are announced for new waste treatment facilities (especially energy from waste plants), the applicants are invariably met with ad hoc opposition groups who cite all sort of bogus reasons for refusal. Lockdown changed our buying habits with the high street shops losing business to online sales. The latter means increased amounts of packaging, a lot of which isn’t being recycled. To me, that issue is also an integral part of the circular economy and needs to be addressed urgently.

We need to accept that waste isn’t going to disappear meantime, and we should be developing a strategic approach with treatment plants to recycle and recover it (including energy) efficiently.

It's not surprising that my views aren’t particularly appreciated by my institute (whose recent stated goal is "to move to a world beyond waste") but when more than two billion of the world’s population currently have no access to an organised system of waste collection and disposal, it’s difficult to ignore my initial training in municipal engineering.

The author spent several decades in the Scottish waste industry