Waste industry "must address carbon efficiency" 26/03/09
The Mayor of London's appointment to the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWaRB), Peter Jones, has claimed that the waste industry will increasingly need to put carbon efficiency at the centre of its plans for facilities as the carbon agenda moves into the spotlight.
Speaking at a London Remade event held on Monday (March 23), Mr Jones said that, if a carbon tax was introduced, the best-placed waste companies would be those whose processes had a low carbon footprint and high energy output.
Commenting on the fact that companies would need to maximise their carbon displacement, he said: "However you do that you are going to have a low cost option when we do have a carbon tax - you get the biggest energy bank and the lowest carbon footprint, you're probably going to be in a pretty good position."
"All of the old style waste industry is going to have to address this issue on carbon efficiency," he added.
Telling the event that "our biggest handicap is that we don't have any tax on carbon", Mr Jones advocated the introduction of a "coherent framework" to explain to the public exactly what the carbon impact of waste disposal processes and proposed treatment facilities would be.
"Until we get this understanding of the flow of materials through the economy then we're going to have a very difficult case to sell to the public," he explained.
He added: "We do need to be able to go out and explain to the public and say that we know the proximity principle and we know the carbon emissions implications."
Commenting on the possibility of a carbon tax being introduced, Mr Jones claimed that, as the Treasury's income from taxes based on labour went down due to a slump in employment, "if you're going to introduce resource taxes, now might be the time to think about it."
Priority materials
Mr Jones' comments came as Mayor Boris Johnson's environment advisor to the Greater London Authority, Isabel Dedring, revealed that the GLA had selected six priority material streams to tackle due to their carbon impact
She explained that the streams - paper and board, organics, textiles, metals, plastic and wood - totalled 44% of London's waste and that the GLA would be looking at them throughout their lifecycle, including trying to boost recycling rates.
Ms Dedring told the event that one of the Authority's priorities was "to unlock the economic value in London's waste", claiming that it would be possible to deliver £2 billion of London's energy consumption through waste.
Ahead of this summer's initial publication of the London Waste Strategy, and the issuing of a public draft in the winter of 2009, she said that they were "trying to narrow down what are the big opportunities and the big hits - those are the areas we need to be focussing on through our planning documents."
WRAP
Delegates at the event also heard from the chief executive of WRAP, Liz Goodwin, who said that the recent market downturn had "reinforced my belief that we have got to look at this as a resource".
She stressed that: "Material of good quality has been able to find markets. Quality extends beyond collection and reprocessing, and we have seen the markets for high quality materials stand up well."
Ms Goodwin said that WRAP envisaged a position for recovery energy from waste in the "totality" of waste management, "we still believe firmly that the answer is about recycling."
She added: "Recycling is working and we must do everything we can to maintain that momentum."
Further calls to consider waste as a resource at all times came from Bob Lisney of LRL Consultancy, the former driving force behind Hampshire county council's Project Integra waste project.
Mr Lisney told the event that: "We don't just want to change the word for waste to resource; we need to change our mindset."
In particular, he called for there to be no distinction between domestic and commercial waste in terms of economic decision making, and for waste to instead be considered as "just materials".