The implementation of the Landfill Directive meant that landfill would never again be available in the UK as readily or as cheaply as it had always been. The UK government knew that in order to comply with the EU Landfill Directive the waste management industry would have to divert up to 5.4million tonnes of waste from landfill by 2010 to comply with its statutory obligations under the Landfill Directive. So, it had to bring about changes, and that was the start of the huge annual price rises through the “Landfill Tax Price Escalator policy” which has now brought taxation in the current year (2011) to £57/tonne for all industrial and commercial waste, including Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) being sent to landfill.

Another part of the big change, which brought a sea-change to the use of landfill in the UK, was the outlawing of all hazardous waste disposal to the same landfills as industrial and commercial/ MSW, barring of course the small quantities mixed in with MSW, such as battery waste and electronic waste which were to be reduced by other measures, at source.

Until then, all wastes other than a few of the most toxic of all wastes which landfill operators refused to accept had been co-disposed to general landfills. That means that the toxic waste, liquids and solids (although all liquids were prohibited to landfill before this date) had been spread into the general waste, and quite successfully allowed to react and stabilise within the body of the waste. If the percentage of toxic waste was kept to below about 20% of the waste landfilled by weight, and mixed into the waste well away from leachate drainage wells in lined and capped landfills this gave no problems of any significance. In fact the move away from co-disposal was a political one, and acceeded to by UK politicians of the day as a compromise for adoption of other UK measures throughout Europe, and not scientifically or environmentally considered by the UK waste industry to be any better than co-disposal. In other words, the UK had to do it in order to comply with long-standing EU practise which their waste industry was not about to change just because the UK and other nations had joined the common market.

It was again, the Landfill Regulations which were implemented to make the necesary UK changes to comply with the requirements of the Landfill Directive to ban the co-disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste from 16 July 2004. Hazardous and non-hazardous wastes have since then be dispatched to mostly separate and appropriately designated sites, possibly with the exception of asbestos waste, which is often disposal to separate haz waste cells at the same landfill site location.

Mono-disposal has ever since been creating hazardous waste time-bombs throughout the UK. However, nobody has shown any concern either at the time or subsequently, which is quite remarkable.

The Regulations also imposed a set of “waste acceptance criteria” (WAC) detailing the types of waste that can be accepted at landfill sites. Most waste, with the exception of municipal waste, now has to meet the WAC.

The Regulations also required hazardous wastes, as identified in the European Waste Catalogue (EWC) to be pre-treated to reduce their quantity and hazardous nature before landfiliing.

The Hazardous Waste Regulations 2004 govern the movement and consignment of hazardous waste from the producer to its final disposal. They replaced the Special Waste Regulations 1996 and introduced new and simpler procedures for hazardous waste, and the Regulations come into force to coincide with the implementation of the waste acceptance criteria.

To complete the picture for you, the producers of waste are subject to a Duty of Care under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 (EPA) to ensure waste does not escape from their control, is only passed to persons authorised to take it, and is accompanied by written descriptions and correctly completed waste transfer notes.

Together with pre-existing legislation relating to fridges, vehicles and batteries, the Regulations effectively made almost every business a hazardous waste producer.

At that time there was a lot of concern that businesses would simply not be able to find enough hazardous waste landfill capacity to dispose of their waste, and people actually suggested that queues would form at the few remaining Hazardous Waste Landfills left holding a licence immediately after implementation of the rules banning co-disposal. If that happened it never hit the press, and since then UK manufacturing factory closures (which were no doubt partly due to the higher cost of hazardous waste disposal to landfill), has resulted in incineration options and recycling by closed-loop waste reprocessing becoming far more common. In combination with the REACH Regulations which make using hazardous materials in products much more difficult to sustain, these measures have and greatly reduced the quantities of hazardous waste generated by UK industry.

In fact, the operators of hazardous waste landfills and hazardous waste incinerators who were investing in these facilities a few years after the co-disposal ban, in the hope of high demand for their void space, and high profits, have been largely disappointed.

Introducing ambitious Europe-wide targets for the separate collection of both food and garden waste could offer environmental and cost benefits worth more than €7billion (£6 billion) between 2013 and 2020, according to a report published as part of the European Commission’s work on potential new EU bio-waste legislation.

The study, entitled ‘Assessment of the options to improve the management of bio-waste in the EU’ was published earlier this year with little fanfare by consultants ARCADIS and Eunomia, to look at the relative benefits and costs of various potential policy measures to deal with bio-degradable waste.

It emerged as the European Parliament’s environment committee is set to consider a draft report this week (April 28) drawn up by one of its members that urges the European Commission to develop proposals for a specific bio-waste directive by the end of 2010.

This could provide renewed momentum for supporters of separate legislation on bio-waste, in the face of recent indications that the Commission did not wish to pursue a legislative proposal.

The consultants’ report concluded that, in all cases where separate targets for collecting the two waste streams were included, there would be a “significant” net benefit to society. The benefit would be increased even further if the food waste was treated using anaerobic digestion (AD), due to the reduced greenhouse gas emissions that brings, it added.

It compares the approach with a ‘baseline’ scenario which assumes EU member states meet the targets for diverting waste from landfill set by the EU Landfill Directive, including a “minimum quantity” of treatment of bio-waste to reach this goal.

The targets outlined in the report as a “high ambition” scenario are 60% for food waste and 90% for green waste to be reached by 2020, with all garden waste above a 2006 baseline level being treated using in-vessel composting and food waste being sent for either IVC or AD.

The report also claimed that there were longer term benefits from providing additional treatment of bio-waste, explaining that: “The additional treatment of source separated bio-waste develops a significant annual benefit to society from 2020 onwards.

“This is of great importance since, given that nearly 40% of the total benefit occurs in 2020, the continued benefits, beyond the period modelled in this study, will remain significant,” it added.

The report is intended to support the Commission’s continuing work on potentially developing a separate legislative proposal for bio-waste, such as a possible ‘Bio-waste Directive’.

A green paper looking at future options for managing bio-waste in the European Union was published by the Commission in December 2008, raising hopes that a separate legislative proposal could be brought forward.

Read the full news items at Organics Recycling.

The United Kingdom (UK) has traditionally used landfill disposal as the main method of waste management. However, it has long been recognised that landfilling is unsustainable due to its long term harmful effects on the environment and public health.

Landfill also places a high long term risk on groundwater quality, which could threaten the availability of clean water for future generations.

Under the European Union (EU) Landfill Directive, and starting in 2006, member nations were required to divert biodegradable municipal waste (BMW) from landfills. The UK has also committed to the EU Renewable Energy Directive, which binds it to sourcing at least 15% of its energy mix from renewables by 2020.

Through the last decade the emphasis was on recycling, and this is still the case, but recycling will only achieve waste diversion up to a point. Therefore, to meet these targets, the UK is developing alternative waste management options as well as planning to achieve considerable deployment of renewables.

Throughout 2009 a number of aspects of UK waste management policy that have been in place for some time came together so that for the first time a genuine shift in the industry could be detected. Investors began to see the wisdom of those that have already anticipated this new vision and have committed to investment in the waste technologies, as many of the smaller more nimbly operators have begun to make profits. Where profit is to be made others will now follow to secure waste contracts for the resource that collected material provides them.

If asked what the single biggest influence on this was during 2009, I would say it as the government’s Landfill Tax escalator policy which meant that for most waste disposers, for the first time, landfill disposal actually became more expensive than recycling. You can argue around the detail here, but I had not before the summer of 2009 witnessed recycling companies able to say they could offer price competitive disposal prices when head to head with the traditional landfill operators.

Another major driving force in UK waste management which is powering the evolution from a disposal problem to a resource optimisation opportunity are the high targets for waste diversion from landfill, and 20 year or longer integrated waste management contracts. These are public/private partnership projects which the UK government is pushing ahead with now in order to achieve those targets.

Here to, we saw a major milestone achieved while the recession was biting the hardest early in 2009. This was the successful planning application, and award of contract, for the £4 billion Greater Manchester Waste PFI Contract, the largest of its kind in Europe, and all built upon stakeholder involvement. However, the Greater Manchester PFI Contract is only the most high profile example of a procurement revolution which probably reached its peak of activity during 2009, and saw similar contracts either largely in place or planned throughout the nation.

The year also saw a number of these projects hit the headlines, and some Energy from Waste schemes being pushed back at planning (Cornwall and Edinburgh for example).

However, the trend continued and accelerated so that for all waste streams and/or locations where re-use or recycling of waste is not viable, energy recovery is being reinforced as the preferred option, with disposal used only as a last resort.

For a long while the major Energy from Waste producer has been from landfills, and it has been landfill gas (LFG) utilisation. However, the relative importance to LFG utilisation as a proportion of total energy from waste production will now be expected to decline.

Each month in the years to come we will see the rollout of new energy from waste (EfW) projects coming on-stream. However, while the adoption of new waste technologies is being supported in the UK by government departments, the perceived high risk for the PFI partnerships, has remained high. 2009 was not good for implementing the more innovative of these.

The increased cautiousness of the banks funding the private element of these projects has come at a very unfortunate time, as it has in my view severely detracted against the bankability of schemes using these new technologies. In fact, 2009 saw the shelving of quite a number of the more adventurous new waste technology options in favour of more traditional incineration technology.

During the year events also reinforced the wisdom of encouraging the use of EfW and other home grown renewable energy source, within the global scene. Most will remember that early in 2009 we saw the deep rationing of natural gas supplies to some European nations which were themselves unconnected with a producer country dispute. This held up supplies during the coldest weather and in a completely arbitrary fashion.

Most now strongly support the benefits of renewable energy for its improved energy supply security, ability to provide climate change mitigation when combined with stiff recycling targets and the highest possible waste diversion, and not least its resource efficiency.

However, good though that may be for waste as an opportunity, the main event of the year was the new found security to the recyclers which came with the attainment of the economic tipping point, whereby landfilling has become more expensive than most forms of main stream recycling activity. From now on the markets in recyclates will operate on a progressively more stable and normal economic basis.

Recycling has always made sense for the environment, but from now on it will also become a natural economically favourable option as well We can also look forward to the future knowing that the landfill tax will rise again in April 2010, taking us further into the new UK era of waste as a resource of opportunity.

Source: New Civil Engineer Magazine

England is too slow at reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill and could face European Union (EU) fines as a result, the government’s public spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office’s Managing the Waste PFI Programme report accuses the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) of being too slow to react when in 1999 the EU ordered member states to cut by 50% the amount of biodegradable waste they send to landfill by 2013.

It added that although 18 new PFI waste schemes worth £1.6bn are underway, local authorities had experienced delays in completing deals and bringing the projects into operation.

Auditor General Tim Burr said: “Defra is doing a lot to accelerate the programme of new waste treatment facilities being procured through private finance.”

“But, at the rate at which projects are being delivered, England risks missing the 2013 EU landfill reduction target, leaving the UK open to the possibility of fines.”

** End of NCE report **

The Waster says: The situation has the potential to deteriorate quite rapidly now for the UK’s PFI award programme. Many contracts have been delayed by the credit crunch which has meant the unexpected renegotiation of terms for loans between PFI providers and their banks when the banking system suffered so heavily in autumn 2008.

A number of PFI Contracts have been due to start since the summer, but still await award, and their programmes (which include building all the new waste processing facilities essential for the UK to meet the UE targets) must necessarily be put back.

The Greater Manchester PFI is just one example of the delays witnessed and was reported by the Wastersblog just after Christmas, yet there is still no news of award.

At the Wasters blog we started the year by reporting the gap between Ireland’s actual rates of recycling and waste diversion away from landfill, and the target requirements. It seems that Ireland will need to speed up its progress or soon face fines from the EU for failing to comply with the targets set up in the Landfill Directive.

This contrasted strongly against stories of success from the United Kingdom which were posted on our blog throughout the year. In fact, the Environment Secretary for Scotland announced ambitious plans to exceed the EU targets, for waste management in Scotland. The new targets amount to 60 percent recycling by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025. Also, incineration received a knock as a part of this plan, when it became clear that no more than 25 percent of waste is to be used to generate energy. The ultimate target is that they will reduce municipal waste being sent to landfill to just 5 percent by 2025. That is quite a target to go for! Especially as the easy option of incineration will be severely capped.

All the time last year, new announcements of new waste collection and massive investment in waste and secondary resource processing facilities planned were being made by the big five waste management companies, and indeed newcomers to the PFI Contracts, especially for the very large big-city contracts.

At the start of the year all were surprised that the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority (GMWDA) was still in extended negotiation for its PFI Contract. In March we were told that they would very soon be announcing the award. However, the end of April arrived before there was a further delay announced. Even now the deal is not resolved.

Of course, all large contract negotiations are suffering from the much tougher bank lending rules which have been in place since the credit crunch really began to bite in the summer. The contractors bidding have found that the banks have been pulling back on their borrowing and at the very least their interest rates will have no doubt been revised. At a contract value in the region of reported £3 billion, and said to be the largest municipal waste contract in Europe, the GMWDA deal must be extremely hard to clinch.

The latest News (from LetsRecycle.com) about the Manchester PFI contract, at the start of December was that the banks were completing final formalities with a hoped for Christmas signing. The Waster has not seen an announcement so far, so we will hopefully receive the good news as one of the first events in the UK waste management scene in 2009!

The Manchester contract, and many others, need signing soon and then to move into the construction stage for the new facilities planned and much needed in order for the UK recycling and waste diversion targets to be met in the years to come.

One of the highlights for the Waster (who has been described as “born to landfill”) was a German research paper reported in April to be recommending the use of landfill as a carbon sink, as in carbon sequestration/storage. The posting was titled “Carbon Storage – A Renaissance for Landfill?”. How refreshing it was for a landfill lover like the Waster to be told that landfilling should be increased and encouraged and certainly not reduced. Wonderful! More of it please!

Autumn news showed the waste industry to be remarkably resilient to the economic slowdown, although landfill operators were, and still are, reporting the current remarkable rarity of once ever-present construction waste vehicles arriving at their landfill gates.

Of course part of the reduction might be due to better management of waste at the construction sites themselves, and in particular this may have had a small effect after the introduction, in the spring by the UK government, of a new legal requirement. The new rule is that all large construction sites produce Site Waste Management Plans (SWMPs) for every site from now on.

However, the lack of much SWMP activity reportedly being seen from the construction industry in setting up these plans shows that it is the economic slowdown rather than much better construction site waste minimisation and recycling that is the predominant effect here!

All in all, the UK waste management industry continues in the path set for it by the politicians in the 1986 Maastricht Treaty. Don’t forget that ALL EU member nation policy on waste-related legislation is derived from the EU commission and through qualified majority voting (unanimity in these matters is a thing of the past). The Waster is UK based and from his point of view the waste legislation has nothing directly to do with public health or environmental health issues in the UK.

In effect this means that the degree to which EU targets are set and goals derived make no allowance for national differences, bear no relationship to what might be more or less sustainable from a climate change perspective, and make no allowance for cost/benefit to local communities.

The Waster’s view is that this is nowhere more obvious than in the last of the big news events of the year. That is the autumn’s big and ever-rising cost of recycling due to the economic slowdown. How can it be right that policy is so inflexible that the ratepayers have to pick up whatever bill the waste industry incurs when the raw materials price falls through the floor?

In any other market there would be a market self-correction when the recyclers reduced their output to match the value gained from the recycled materials. In fact, the recycling market is bound to create these huge fluctuations as it is so distorted by inflexible EU policy.

As the Waster has been around for a long time, he continues to see it as remarkable that the current waste policies have lasted for as long as they have in their current form and ever increasingly are being built with huge investment into the fabric of our nation.

The concern must be how well technically they are based, when MBT in all its forms is put forward as better than incineration by our policy makers. Given public hostility in the UK to incineration it may be convenient to neglect the fact that no proper primary research has been done into the long-term impacts of MBT residues which receive only scant drying or composting treatment in order to declassify them from being organic waste. This allows this supposedly processed material to be sent to landfill without, on paper, contributing the the organic waste sent to landfill. This must surely be bending the rules beyond the point of forgiveness, purely for convenience?

Furthermore, why all the obsession we see with the carbon cycle within the waste regulators and impacts – to the almost complete neglect of consideration of the nitrogen cycle?

Both must be got right for a healthy environment and both need very careful consideration. However, the Waster is not aware of any recent research into the fate of nitrogen from waste residues, which he considers must be highly neglectful.

As we said earlier, the Waster does have a long memory, and he does remember that the UK only signed up to the Landfill Directive after resisting doing so for 11 years, in exchange for a deal with the Spanish on fishing quotas!

We did not know then what that had to do with sound waste management or environmental protection, and that has not changed.

So, the Waster will continue through 2009 to take a critical view of the waste scene as it implements EU legislation, and will plea for ALL aspects of policy to be founded on sound principles, rather than embarking on huge investments in waste technology in waste processing without good research to back up politically convenient theory.

Those were the main issues for the Wastersblog in 2008, and that ends our look back at the year 2008.

Your comments on this blog posting will, as always, be highly welcomed. Don’t be shy – comment away! (Email me direct if you have any problems with the commenting system on the blog site. All previous problems you might have experienced with the comments system have been rectified.)

The Waster would like to take this opportunity to wish all his readers a happy and prosperous new year.

EU environment ministers have officially approved a new framework for waste management across their 27 member countries, including a five-step hierarchy for waste treatment which classes “energy-efficient waste incineration a recovery operation”. The directive also sets new recycling targets.

By 2020, EU member states must recycle 50% of their household and similar waste and 70% of their construction and demolition waste, says the new directive.

It also contributes to legal simplification by repealing the current waste framework directive, the directive on hazardous waste, and part of the directive on waste oils. The Council of the European Union says it also “modernises” waste legislation by:

* introducing an environmental objective
* clarifying the notions of recovery, disposal, end of waste status and by-product
* defining the conditions for mixing hazardous waste
* and specifying a procedure for the establishment of technical minimum standards for certain waste management operations.

The directive “introduces a new approach to waste management that encourages the prevention of waste,” states the Council, with safe landfill disposal listed as “a last resort” in the hierarchy, which all governments and local authorities must apply when developing waste policies.

“By promoting the use of waste as a secondary resource, the new directive is intended to reduce the landfill of waste as well as potent greenhouse gases arising from such landfill sites,” the Council states.

The directive’s approval comes after several years of tough negotiations, with a proposal to overhaul the EU’s waste policy originally tabled in 2005.

To reach agreement the Parliament had to drop any reference to binding waste prevention targets to be applied at a national level. EU countries will instead have to adopt waste prevention programs five years after this directive comes into force.

In adopting the directive the Council accepted all amendments voted by the European Parliament in the second reading in June. Member states are “required to transpose the directive into national law within two years”. More…

Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing Jane Davidson said:

“I am delighted that for the fourth successive year each Welsh local authority has exceeded its LAS targets.”

I would like to congratulate every Local Authority for its hard work and commitment and for their continued success in working towards this target.

These figures show clearly that nationally Wales is ahead of the target set for diverting biodegradable municipal waste from landfill which in addition to reducing the amount of rubbish that goes into landfill also helps in the battle against climate change.

Ms Davidson continued:

“As a nation we need to reduce the amount of waste that we send to landfill as this is the least sustainable method of managing our waste.”

We need concerted effort by everyone, both householders and businesses to achieve more recycling and less landfill. More…

A new LATS market place is to be launched later this year, but both levels of trading and prices remain low, forcing many waste disposal authorities to write off their ever-growing amounts of surplus allowances.

The government-funded Regional Improvement & Efficiency Partnerships, led by Improvement Efficiency South East, is to set up a market place for trading under the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS) this summer.

Defra’s second LATS news letter, circulated amongst councils last week, states that an advert will be placed to select a provider of the service to “deliver confidentiality, contractual security, a ‘level playing field’ for all involved and fixed transaction fees”.

Among the goals of the new market place are to “save time spent on price and volume discovery and administration”, “provide commonly agreed simple, standardised contracts for transactions” and to “allow buyers or sellers to buy or sell into the best available price at any pre-agreed time”.

The service will also be able to notify the Department, and the Environment Agency, of any potential market abuse, and will work closely with both of them, and the Local Government Association, to provide a “valuable service” to councils.

Avenues currently available for LATS trading include the Defra-run LATS Bulletin Board, direct trades between councils and also the use of a broker as an intermediary to arrange transfers of the allowances.

Trading

However, ahead of its introduction, both levels of trading and prices remain low, with a number of local authorities indicating that they are still unable to sell their large number of surplus allowances.

Last year, councils expressed their disappointment about being unable to make money from the surplus allowances they had hoped to sell (see letsrecycle.com story).

This situation has arisen as councils have introduced waste minimisation measures, boosted their recycling rates, and, in some cases, brought new waste treatment facilities on-line.

As a result, more and more councils hold a surplus of allowances, but an ever-decreasing number need to buy additional LATS allowances to allow them to send more waste to landfill.

And, while the system has allowed councils to bank their surplus allowances for either future use or to be traded, with 2009-10 being the first target year for the UK under the EU Landfill Directive, they will not be able to bank any in either 2008-09 or 2009-10.

As a result, councils with a surplus of allowances for the period 2005-06 to 2008-09 will not be able to carry them forward, and, with cash trading minimal at best, they are being forced to write them off.

Surplus

The 2007-08 accounts for the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority indicated that: “Despite its best efforts, the Authority has been unable to sell any of its surplus allowances during the year and current market indications are that there is a surfeit of prospective sellers and no apparent buyers for current allowances.

“In view of this the Authority considers that the current batch of LATS allowances are of no value and allowances held have been written down accordingly,” it added.

Full article at Letsrecycle.

Overall, the report shows that, although the quantity of waste that was recycled increased between 2005 and 2006, so, too, did the total quantity of waste generated.

Dr. Padraic Larkin, Deputy Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency, said – “This report shows that the amount of waste going to landfill is increasing – not decreasing as we would have expected if Ireland is to meet its EU commitment to landfill less than one million tonnes of biodegradable municipal waste by 2010.

“The EPA is calling for urgent action to reverse this trend. There are several policy instruments that could turn the tide within one to two years. These include increasing the landfill levy and banning the landfilling of untreated waste. This problem must be tackled in 2008.”

Quantities and rates of recycled waste

The quantity of waste being recycled continues to grow significantly. In 2006, the amount of municipal waste recycled increased by 18 per cent.  The figures show that an additional 14 per cent of household waste was recycled in 2006, with increases of 8 and 26 per cent for packaging waste and biodegradable municipal waste, respectively.

Despite the increases in the actual quantity of waste recycled, the rate of municipal waste recycling only increased from 34 per cent in 2005, to 36 per cent in 2006. The recycling rate for household waste remained at 22 per cent in the same period, despite the roll-out in all parts of the country of two-bin and three-bin systems for household waste collection and the large-scale use of bring banks (where 14 per cent more waste was deposited in 2006) and civic amenity sites (where 84 per cent more waste was deposited in 2006).

Dr. Gerry Byrne, EPA Programme Manager, said – “Overall, there is very good progress to report on the recycling front. Householders and businesses are willing to recycle once they are given the appropriate incentives and services.”

Increase in landfilling of waste

The quantity of municipal waste being disposed of to landfill increased by 8 per cent in 2006 – a disappointing result, given the overall progress in reducing landfill since 2001.

According to Dr Gerry Byrne – “significant problems remain with regard to waste disposal. Urgent action is required in 2008 to divert waste from landfill and prevent further increases in waste generation.”

More…

The introduction of the EC landfill directive means that the European Commission has set targets to reduce the levels of biodegradable materials going to landfill.

The most significant challenge facing the management of Municipal Solid Waste is how to divert the biodegradable component of MSW away from landfills. Biodegradable Municipal Waste (BMW) is the fraction that will break down naturally in the environment, and it is the content within the rubbish that goes into landfills which causes the nuisance smalls and attracts birds etc.

This organic waste includes: kitchen wastes, green or garden wastes, paper, cork and non man-made textiles (eg cotton and wool). The need to reduce the levels of biodegradable materials going to landfill is based on concerns over greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The decomposition of biodegradable materials within landfill sites results in the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. One of the best options for dealing with the biodegradable fraction of municipal solid waste is Anaerobic Digestion.

It is a natural process. It is simply rotting or composting in the absence of air. The magic is though that it produces methane, and methane is a raw product which can be sued to make biofuels including bio-diesel, and many others.

It costs a bit more than composting or disposal to landfill but the benefits are tremendous. Visit our anaerobic digestion web site and view our VIDEO which in just over 5 minutes explains how the process works.

If you don’t believe us about this then listen to the BBC Radio 4′s long-running soap, the “Archers” in which there is, at present, a storyline about AD.