The sound of broken promises

 

The failure to achieve UK-wide reform of waste and recycling services is a case study in back-sliding, incompetence and political amnesia.

Hear that silence? It’s the sound of the resources and waste strategy, which should have begun this year, not being implemented. What resources and waste strategy, you ask? Well, let’s go back to 2018, when Michael Gove was a bright-eyed, fresh-faced Defra secretary. Green issues were higher up the national agenda. Theresa May, as prime minister, had promised to “leave the environment in a better state than we found it”

Gove is a details person. The resources and waste strategy that he shepherded into being (Wales and Scotland had already implemented zero waste policies) was a well-thought-through plan to reform waste collection and recycling services in England. It had three main elements. Firstly, consistent collection would mean that all councils would recycle the same materials in the same way – glass of any colour, plastic pots, tubs and trays, paper and card, metal, including aluminium foil, green waste and food waste.

Secondly, under a more radical change called extended producer responsibility (EPR) the producers of the packaging that we generally throw away with little thought would pay for its collection and treatment by councils, rather than council taxes and government grants – a sum estimated nationally at £2.7bn. Under a ‘modulated’ system, they would pay lower fees for their packaging if it was easy to recycle. In 2022, business waste and litter, in England, were excluded from EPR.

Begun in Germany in the early 1990s, EPR is a brilliant idea. It gives brand holders – think Coca Cola, MacDonalds, Unilever – a fantastic incentive to wrap up their often extravagantly-packaged goodies with fewer materials and more recycled content, leading to reduced carbon emissions and less plastic being burned or landfilled and ending up in fishes’ stomachs.

A strand of the EU’s Green Deal, EPR promotes the waste hierarchy – reduce, re-use, recycle – and circular economies, in which fewer resources will need to be dug out of the ground, to make new things. The classic example of a circular economy for waste, is aluminium. It’s easy to melt down and re-use. If we recycle all of our drinks cans (which we are actually close to doing in the UK) we will need to mine and transport far less bauxite.

Brand holders and EPR

Large brand holders are surprisingly agnostic about the concept. In many cases, they are in favour. EPR reduces countries’ tax burdens and helps to save the planet. They can hardly oppose it. The idea is eventually going to catch on everywhere.

The third main element to the resources and waste strategy is a deposit return scheme (DRS). It will mean that consumers will be paid back a deposit, estimated at 20p, for each glass or plastic bottle or drinks can that they return. Again, it’s a great idea that is proving highly effective in increasing recycling rates in Scandinavia and parts of Germany. Revenue raised helps to pay for further collection and recycling infrastructure – a circle within a circle.

The strategy seems too good to be true, doesn’t it – the UK becoming an environmentally-responsible country well set on the path to net zero. Well, it is too good to be true. We have had four Defra secretaries since Michael Gove in 2018. One of them, Ranil Jayawardena, lasted for less than two months.

With each secretary, the resources and waste strategy has slipped further into the realms of impossibility – think Kate Winslet in Titanic gradually losing her grip on Leonardo DiCaprio, as he slides into the icy water of the Atlantic. In the war-ravaged context of 2023, it is becoming a chimera.

There are a few things that we can be positive about. To reduce single-use plastics, the government has levied a tax on plastic packaging with less than 30% recycled content. In November 2021, royal assent was given to a wide-ranging Environment Act. It legislates for consistent waste collection in England and sets timetables for DRS and EPR.

A strategy with no champion

You may not know about resources and waste strategy. There are several reasons. A lot has occupied politicians’ minds since 2018. We’ve had Covid, the fallout from Brexit, the war in Ukraine, the Liz Truss fiasco, the energy crunch and the cost-of-living crisis. And the government, preoccupied by its own survival, has suffered a teenage identity crisis, with its leadership positions on shuffle.

Most importantly, the strategy has not had the high-profile political champion that such a radical package needs – a Nye Bevan or a Michael Heseltine. Its main elements have proved to be an extremely hard sell. The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) has bitterly opposed EPR, saying that extra costs for food manufacturers will be handed on to consumers. Small drinks manufacturers say that adding an increased cost to their products, under DRS, will put them out of business. Recycling trade associations argue that DRS will reduce volumes and divert revenues from well-functioning municipal collection streams.

Consequently, essential consultations have been delayed and milestones and deadlines have slipped. Under the strategy’s original deadline, 2022 was to be a key year, with a national scheme administrator appointed. That did not happen, leading to speculation that the reforms may be scrapped. In January, came an announcement. EPR is now set to begin nationally in 2024 and DRS the following year, for England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Inevitably, suspicions linger that the full strategy may never see the light of day. Meanwhile, Wales and Scotland have been moving ahead at their own speeds. Wales benefits from the Well-being of Future Generations Act, which embeds the principle of sustainable development, carbon reduction and biodiversity across all areas of government.

While English local authorities hugely improved their recycling rates in the 2000s, most had stuck at 45% or less, before Covid which decreased recycling rates. Welsh councils have already achieved an average of 65%, which is the third highest rate in the world, and the target of the national waste and resources strategy. Consistent collection has become the norm in Wales, without the need for legislation.

The Scottish government is also more committed to waste reform than Westminster. On current plans, a DRS scheme will begin in Scotland in August, earlier than the rest of UK. Environment minister, Lord Benyon, has described this is a “ridiculous” move that will “create carnage”. He has predicted “bottle cruises” in which people travel south of the border to buy drinks at 50% less cost. Oh dear, what a mess.

Waste is a devolved issue but to achieve a national circular economy will require close co-operation between Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff. There’s not much chance of that happening any time soon. The inability to deal with rubbish is the most basic indication of political failure. But this failure is not merely aesthetic, it’s about a lack of commitment to sustainability and human survival. Faltering environmental advances made under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, ‘the king of wind’, are now sliding into reverse.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He has written for the Guardian and the New Statesman and was editor of a weekly, then monthly magazine, Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own

It's time for tree-based economics

 

Will Hatchett wonders how long it will be before value is directly linked to carbon impact. He argues that this concept could be the basis of a global currency – the tree

 

It used to be tie-dyed and counter cultural. But, in the past fifty years, a slightly heavy-seeming guest has joined the environmental movement. Blame Star Trek and Dr Spock. A pointy-headed person with a puzzled expression is now lounging on the beanbags at the save-the-world party – an economist.

 

It is becoming increasingly clear that to stave off destruction of planetary ecosystems, we will need to quantify the elements of nature. Carbon was the first candidate. Carbon is being chased down and measured everywhere, as companies pursue the desirable and investment-friendly goal of net zero – not just as direct emissions from burning fossil fuels, but the carbon ‘embodied’ in the making and moving of things.

 

Sophisticated data capture, using AI, and venture capital investment are driving this process. Financial technology (or fintech), which led to a welcome DIY culture in the investment world, has spawned cleantech and proptech and other yet-to-be named disciplines. Some of this, of course, is PR hype. But some of it isn’t. Surprise, surprise, some investors don’t just want to be rich – but to be ‘nice rich’. This can be interpreted as self-interest – if the planet dies, we all die. Even if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get to Mars, in their home-made rocket ships, most people expect that it won’t go well for them.

 

The Gaia hypothesis, popularised by the English scientist and futurist James Lovelock in the 1970s, was backed by some serious-looking maths, but it was basically a simple concept – the planet and everything upon it as an interconnected network of linked and self-regulating systems, forming a single entity. This touchy-feely notion was perfect for its time.

 

Society is less polychrome now. The atmosphere at the save-the-world party is serious. The walls are grey. We’re protecting the biosphere here guys! Everybody has a laptop. Compared to the 1970s, humans have access to vast computational power. But all save-the-world scenarios need a wild-haired genius, scribbling forests of runic equations on the wall. Today, they would probably be an economist.

 

The reason? Financial markets and capital flows, albeit guided by political jurisdictions, have sculpted and formed the damaged world that we are living in, since the first industrial revolution – the agri-deserts that stretch to the horizon, the plastic-souped oceans with their eutrophic dead zones. Ergo it is markets than can save us.

 

Investments and capital flows are shaped by measurement. Measurement facilitates comparison. But we’ve been doing it wrong, bro. Money, as a medium of exchange forms one ecosystem interacting with that of commodities being moved around and made into other things. Other than by the simple law of supply and demand the relationship between the two ecosystems is non-contingent. What if they were more directly connected?

 

Rise of natural capital

 

It’s hard to reliably measure the benefits of more sustainable activities, in a way that allows meaningful comparison. That’s why nature is now being evaluated for its ‘ecosystem services’ and as ‘natural capital’ and converted into currency value. In 2020, the asset value of UK natural capital was estimated by Defra at £1.8trn ¹. This can be a useful exercise, for example, in calculating the environmental impact of a new project, and it is being used for this purpose – but it can be accused of subjectivity.

 

Perhaps this methodology is a transitional one. Damage to the biosphere, associated with climate change and mass global extinctions, has been caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. We need to reduce carbon from energy generation, travel, manufacturing and farming and we know that low carbon activities are socially beneficial and that they heal earth and water and their resources.

 

Technology is close to being able to generate a carbon impact number (CIN) for all products and services. This could serve as parallel unit of value for consumers and would greatly influence markets – the demand for fast fashion, for example, which is responsible for a tenth of the world’s ghg emissions ², would significantly fall. But we could move beyond this. Here’s my idea. The average amount of carbon sequestered by an average mature tree in one year, could form one unit of carbon currency – the tree.

 

Some people see crypto currency as a universal, neo-utopian means of exchange, arguing that it can serve as a global reserve currency and is accessible to those with no access to conventional financial services, such as bank accounts. There is another candidate for a non-fungible exchange token – the tree.

 

Trees wrap up a load of environmental benefits. They absorb carbon. They look good. They produce food and many other valuable products. They can be integrated with sustainable arable farming systems and animal husbandry. Humans have always lived amidst trees. But we started to clear them on a landscape-changing scale in the Neolithic era, long before the first industrial revolution.

 

A tree is a quantum – the smallest and most holistic practicable unit of natural goodness that we have – perfect as a unit of exchange and as a symbol of good intent. And trees are already being traded to provide carbon credits in carbon offsetting markets.

 

We may have missed out on delivering of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. We had actually made significant progress on many of them before the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine War. I would argue that the adoption of carbonaceous economics could be a key development on the path to a better world. It’s like taking the building blocks of capitalism, scattering them across the ground and setting them up again. What would Marx have thought?

 

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986. He has written for the Guardian and the New Statesman and was editor of a weekly, then monthly magazine, Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own

1 UK naturalcapital accounts: 2022

 

 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/bulletins/uknaturalcapitalaccounts/2022

 

 2 Can fashionever be sustainable?

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200310-sustainable-fashion-how-to-buy-clothes-good-for-the-climate