4th November 2014
In my last blog, I talked about the way that the ‘waste industry’ was changing. This change is particularly apparent in the new types of jobs we now have to recruit for at SITA UK. The number of these new roles has steadily increased over the last three to four years, but it is now really gathering pace. So, what
3rd November 2014
The Government’s response to the Environmental Audit Committee’s Inquiry Growing a Circular Economy: Ending the Throwaway Society contains the now-familiar mixture of mild ambition and platitudes that characterised its evidence before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee’s Inquiry Waste Management in England. There, the Government was taken to task for ‘stepping back’ precisely at a time when vision, a
24th October 2014
Defra may have hoped that fences had been mended with the waste management sector since its now infamous letter last November, which announced that it would be “stepping back from areas where there was no sign of market failure”. However, those hopes must surely have been dashed by the publication of the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
20th October 2014
I will soon celebrate my 12-year stint in the ‘waste industry’, as the recycling and resource sector was once referred to. I have done a lot of interviewing recently and was asked by one of the candidates why, after more than a decade, I was still in the waste business and working for SITA UK. The answer I gave was
17th October 2014
The headline from a recent YouGov poll examining public attitudes towards recycling was that Britain’s so-called Facebook generation (youth aged 18-24) “are the most apathetic generation when it comes to recycling waste”. Apparently only 57 per cent of 18-24 year olds admitted to being committed recyclers, with 71 per cent thinking recycling was not their personal responsibility. In contrast, the
6th May 2014
Demographic changes in the UK have occurred not just in the general population, but also in the business population. These changes make interesting reading in terms of the future prospects for waste and resource management. Latest figures published by the Department for Business Innovation & Skills in October 2013 estimated that there were 4.9 million private sector businesses in the
14th January 2014
Two years ago, SITA UK published a document called ‘Driving Green Growth’ , which aimed to help Government understand the potential of the waste and resource recovery industry. We listed the potential opportunities, which included: Investment of £20-£25 billion 84,000 direct and indirect new jobs Millions of tonnes of resources recovered and reinserted into the economy A 10 per cent
11th December 2013
We are just emerging from one of the hardest and longest recessions in living memory. Thankfully, the economy is looking far healthier than it did a year ago, with construction activities picking up and manufacturing starting on the road to recovery. This last point was made clear to me recently at the Manufacturer Directors’ Conference in Birmingham, where I experienced
3rd December 2013
The waste-to-resource sector is one of the most active, rapidly growing and capital-intensive sectors in the UK at this time. Our sector has a value in excess of £12 billion and directly employs well over 100,000 people. It reportedly grew at a rate of 3.1 per cent this year and is expected to grow by more than four per cent next
10th October 2013
Talking to Radio 4’s ‘Costing the Earth’ programme about landfill mining and the resources that have been embedded in landfill sites over the last 50 years, followed by a meeting where we contemplated the future of the waste sector in a sustainable resource economy, has given me an opportunity to reflect. Looking back and understanding what we as a society
