9th November 2017
I’m a rugby enthusiast and coach a youth team in my spare time. Very often, I find myself reminding zealous parents and spectators that the youngsters playing a game are still learning. Naturally, judging their performance and skills and expecting results worthy of a national team is not constructive nor supportive to relatively inexperienced players. At the end of the day, we
6th July 2017
Andy Hill, in his role as chair of the Wood Recyclers Association, explains why we need to recognise the value of waste wood as an asset towards the UK’s energy security. It’s within many of our lifetimes that we can remember the days of power cuts, coal miner strikes and the like. The days when the UK’s energy market was
24th July 2015
Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at the FEAD conference in London about innovation in the waste industry. While preparing my presentation, I sought some thoughts and opinions from others in the industry, to see what ‘innovation’ meant to them.
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
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
17th June 2014
In articulating what a circular economy should look like, the latest thinking is that it is not just about recycling, where end-of-use articles and products are destroyed in order to recover the materials contained in them. There is a so-called ‘inner loop’ of reuse that should be prioritised first. Products that have come to the end of their ‘first’ life
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
21st October 2013
Tesco gave some challenging insight to food waste in their report “Tesco and Society: Using our Scale for Good” issued today. Nearly 30,000 tonnes of waste food from the supply chain, store and customer is a big target to work towards, but by my calculations this amounts to around 25kg per Tesco store per day or assuming Tesco’s 30 per
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
