24th March 2016
The news that the Environmental Regulation Unit located within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) will transfer to Defra on 1 April 2016 is to be welcomed. Covering the majority of EU producer responsibility (PR) legislation enacted in the UK (batteries, WEEE, end of life vehicles, and parts of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive) the Unit’s rightful
25th January 2016
The circular economy has been so extensively studied over recent years, at least at the level of principles and policies that coming up with fresh and novel angles is becoming increasingly difficult. For all the qualities we have come to expect – comprehensive, well written, full of interesting material flow and economic data difficult to obtain elsewhere – the latest
16th November 2015
The revelation following the BBC Sunday Politics show (8 November, 2015) that the private sector operated as a “cartel” and that their involvement in waste collection did not increase competition is a curious inversion of the argument generally put forward for outsourcing waste collection, as opposed to keeping the service in-house.
13th November 2015
The news that Defra is to face a budget reduction of 30 per cent over the next four years will not come as much of a surprise to most waste-watchers if that departmental cut is salami-sliced across to Rory Stewart’s waste and resources team. Given the low-key approach to waste management that Defra has taken over the past few years,
23rd October 2015
The news that Birmingham City Council (BCC) has not only missed its 2014/15 household waste recycling target of 35 per cent by six percentage points, but has also downgraded its 2015/16 target from 35 per cent to 30 per cent highlights many of the concerns SUEZ and others in the waste management sector have expressed to the new government. Firstly,
26th August 2015
The news that Wales has hit an overall recycling and composting rate of 56 per cent in 2014/15 with an increase of two per cent from the previous year comes as a welcome corrective to the gloomy news from England, which only managed an increase of 0.6 per cent to 44.8 per cent over the same period.
25th August 2015
The Scottish Government is to be commended for opening a wide-ranging consultation on “creating a more circular economy in Scotland”, end date 30 October 2015. The consultation document Making things Last is a call for action along each of the various stages of the supply chain, starting with product design and progressing through reuse, repair, remanufacturing, recycling, recovery, and ending
25th August 2015
Repair, reuse and remanufacturing continue to get a raw deal from policymakers. A panel discussion on current performance and future challenges in the UK held at the recent CIWM’s conference Resourcing the Future 2015 highlighted this fact in contrast to the undoubted success the UK has enjoyed in raising recycling rates. Yet the European Union household waste target of 50
13th August 2015
December 2014 saw the launch of the report Triple Win: The Social, Economic and Environmental Case for Remanufacturing. It is generally forgotten that the target in Article 11 of the Waste Framework Directive requires the UK to achieve 50 per cent recycling and reuse of paper, glass, plastics and metals from households by 2020. But reuse, which broadly speaking includes
3rd August 2015
Opinion written for and published on www.letsrecycle.com on 03 August 2015. Dr Gev Eduljee, head of external affairs at Suez, discusses the broad nature of the concept of a circular economy. As a circle stitching together the entire “take-make-dispose” economy, the circular economy concept is by its very nature a very broad church. But is this flexibility now becoming a
