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.

Landfill compactors will be less used than today.

Government has a 2012 target of halving construction waste to landfill

Several of the industry’s leading contractors yesterday signed up to a Government-backed initiative to halve the amount of construction waste sent to landfill by 2012.

Bovis Lend Lease, Laing O’Rourke and Stanhope were among the clients, contractors and waste firms to sign up to the Waste and Resources Action Plan’s (WRAP) Construction Commitments: Halving Waste to Landfill scheme, launched in Westminster on Thursday evening.

The voluntary agreement calls on all parties in the supply chain to publicly state their own chosen waste reduction targets, with the aim that overall the industry will achieve the Government’s ambitious 2012 target of halving construction waste to landfill.

Bovis Lend Lease aims to cut the amount of construction waste it sends to landfill by 70% by 2010. Speaking at the launch yesterday Bovis chief operating officer Nick Pollard said: “Construction waste for us is unacceptable because it represents a bad out come for our business. It is symptomatic of poor engineering, over-ordering, poor storage and not least poor design; all impacting on the bottom line for us and our clients. Given the current economic climate, it’s something that commercially we can’t afford to ignore.”

As well as Bovis, Laing O’Rourke and Stanhope, other bodies that supported the agreement’s launch included Defence Estates, Berkeley Group, SEGRO and Willmott Dixon.

After the launch, more firms signed up immediately, including French contractor Vinci.

Strategic Forum for Construction chairman Nick Raynsford MP, also speaking at the agreement’s launch, warned that it was not enough for only the big names in construction to be aware of the need to cut construction waste, 25M tonnes of which is sent to landfill every year.

“This industry is vast and reaching white van man is an important task,” said Raynsford. “If we just get the message to the leaders then everything we are aiming for will not be achieved.”

More at http://www.nce.co.uk/environment

Companies handling construction waste in Wales can now sign up to a standard recognising that they are disposing of it correctly and in line with their Duty of Care.

Launched by Constructing Excellence in Wales (CEW) and Jane Davidson, Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing, the ‘Green Compass’ standard is the first of several planned initiatives intended to ensure construction and demolition waste is being disposed of safely and environmentally.

In 2005, one third of waste sent to licensed waste management sites in Wales was from the construction sector, with over half ending up in landfill. The standard – which was developed in cooperation with the industry – is part of several initiatives being developed to potentially divert “significant quantities” of construction waste away from landfill.

Speaking at the launch of the standard on Monday (September 29), Ms Davidson said: “I have awarded £1.5 million of funding to CEW for three years to help the industry reduce and recycle more of its waste. CEW is now turning ideas into action in the form of the Construction Waste Programme.”

“The construction industry has been on board every step of the way to develop this programme and suggest ways of improving the current situation. Green Compass is a result of one of these ideas; I believe it will make a big impact on diverting significant quantities of waste from landfill and also help minimise our carbon footprint,” she added.

CEW has commissioned the British Standards Institution (BSI) to develop the ‘Green Compass’ standard as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS 402), with companies invited to sign up and demonstrate sound waste management for potential customers.

The scheme is currently being developed further through a pilot scheme with ten companies testing the standard in a trial which will run until July 2009. A public consultation will also be held to seek a wider selection of views from stakeholders on the intent of the scheme.

Paul Jennings, CEW’s construction waste programme director, said: “We have a huge task to reach out, educate and work with the entire construction waste industry in Wales and in time we will address each aspect of the construction process, but the best starting point is the actual handling of waste itself.” More at Let’sRecycle.

More about construction waste and Site Waste Management Plans.

This is part of a report published in the Highways magazine June 2008. I won’t publish it all here for copyright reasons. (It may be available at http://www.highways-mag.co.uk/ )

Cambridgeshire County Council is believed to be the country’s leading county for recycling waste materials and recently demonstrated and reinforced its commitment to the policy. The county’s highways service, in conjunction with its Term Maintenance Services partner Atkins, which forms Cambridgeshire Highways, has opted to recycle in-situ a 2km stretch of the B1040 road, which runs parallel to and directly alongside the River Nene at Ramsey St Mary’s, about 20km south west of Peterborough. The road mainly takes agricultural vehicles and is the only means of access to several residential and agricultural properties.

Cambridgeshire Highways considered three reconstruction options for this particular site. These were traditional reconstruction, where the existing material is excavated and replaced by new, ex-situ or off site recycling, where the existing material is removed to a mobile mixing plant for blending prior to returning to site, and in-situ recycling, where the existing material is recycled in place.

In-situ recycling was used and the author states that it was found to be much faster, cheaper, much less disruptive to traffic and far more environmentally acceptable with a carbon footprint considerably less than off site recycling or normal reconstruction methods. Off site or ex-situ recycling and traditional reconstruction techniques require vastly more lorry movements to transport materials to and from the site. Also in-situ recycling, unlike conventional repairs, does not generally require the disposal of surplus material or the importation of large quantities of new materials.

This is what Site Waste Management Planning is about.

The template, which supports standard, good and best practice in general construction, housing and civil engineering projects, has been developed with Halcrow, Costain, C4S, the NHBC Foundation and the BRE to support the industry in developing their plans. The template comprises a series of 14 steps, which follow the construction lifecycle from pre-design to project completion and review.  Using the template will enable contractors to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for waste and materials, and monitor performance throughout the project. Importantly, the template can be used to demonstrate good and best practice performance beyond simple standard compliance with the regulations.

Mervyn Jones, WRAP Programme Manager for Waste Minimisation and Management, comments: “Now that SWMPs are to become mandatory we wanted to provide an approach that would not just help the sector and its clients comply with the legislation, but also offer the opportunity to identify and deliver good and best practice in reducing waste and using materials more efficiently. The template will lead construction professionals through both the development and implementation of the plan, at each stage of construction.”

The template can be implemented from the conception of a project and offers the flexibility for use either in its entirety or for relevant elements to be incorporated into existing templates or systems that a company may have in place.  It will allow contractors to predict and monitor the waste produced by a project, detail decisions taken to minimise waste generated, and at completion produce final reports to demonstrate overall performance.

The template includes guidance at each step to enable professionals to understand the data they need to input and how it can be used to inform the rest of the plan.  The template is part of a suite of WRAP resources to support SWMPs. More…”

The Waster says: These templates look awe inspiringly complicated! A £300,000 project is not large, and yet these templates are intended from that size project and upward. It will amaze me if these templates get used.

There is surely a need for a more down to earth approach toward compliance than these templates. We need tools designed for the average contractor with uncomplicated waste disposal needs for the vast majority of simple projects.

These templates smack at a project completed by a Spreadsheet Wiz, but very few in the industry will be on this wavelength at all – in my view. I hope the industry proves me wrong, because the aims of reducing waste and saving money are worthwhile.

Not sure what a Site Waste Management Plan is? For a summary of the requirements and an explanatory video visit our SWMP hubpage here.