TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2000

MS SARAH OPPENHEIMER and MS LIANA STUPPLES

  760. You suggested targets. Are you saying that those should be the government targets?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) We have suggested that a suitably challenging yet achievable government target would be 50 per cent recycling by the year 2010. That is the sort of target that will bring us into line with international best practice. If you look at the Netherlands, their target is 60 per cent by the end of this year. We already have Switzerland and Germany well over 50 per cent. We have the United States with a target of 35 per cent by 2005.

  761. The key is now how do we do it in the United Kingdom.
  (Ms Oppenheimer) We think that every household should have a convenient and effective recycling service. For the majority of households in large, urban areas, that would mean a doorstep collection. Perhaps in very sparsely populated areas that would not be the most effective way. If you look at the household waste stream, about a third of it is made up of compostable organics. About another third is paper and card and then about eight per cent is glass. Metals, textiles and plastics can also be recycled. We could achieve that target of 50 per cent in theory by composting and anaerobic digestion alone. Energy should be directed perhaps at improving home composting, community composting, centralised composting and then collections for paper. We know that the Aylesford Paper Mill would like to expand. It needs to depend on a regular source of—

  762. What would you give households in terms of the deposit boxes, bags, bins so that they can separate the waste streams for collection? What would they be labelled?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) I would not like to prescribe a system for every household in this country.

  763. I am asking one of you to give us an idea.
  (Ms Oppenheimer) An example is for a household to have a plastic box with a lid where they put their dry recyclables; another collection for their organic waste and a third collection for their residual waste.

  764. What is residual?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) Things that cannot be composted or recycled at the moment.

  765. Such as?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) Such as nappies, composite materials that have a bit of metal and a bit of plastic in that cannot be separated by the householder. At the moment, research shows that about 20 per cent of the waste stream is residual waste.

  766. Are you saying that should be incinerated or landfilled? What would you do with that residual?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) Ultimately, we shall be talking to the producers of that residual waste to design it better for recycling. Ultimately, we would be looking to design away that residual waste. In the meantime, we do need some sort of mechanism for that transition process, be it landfill or incineration or some of the newer technologies. Our concern is that the current technologies do not crowd out recycling and composting and our concern with incineration is that a lot of the plans that we are seeing coming forward from local authorities at the moment are so big as to crowd out the potential for recycling, which is at the moment about 80 per cent.

  767. Basically three separate streams?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) At the household, yes.

  768. Food waste. Would it not be better to get it to go down the drain and let the sewage companies deal with it?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) I do not have a lot of expertise about the sort of mechanism you are describing, but personally I very successfully compost all my fruit and vegetable peelings.

  769. They are fairly easy are they not, but the bits of gristle and meat?
  (Ms Oppenheimer) As Andy Moore from the Community Recycling Network said, there are a lot of new, `in-vessel' composting technologies now that can very effectively deal with these types of food waste and produce marketable products at the end that can be used as fertilizers or things like that. A collection system for those, as long as it is hygienic, seems to be sensible.
  (Ms Stupples) You would have to achieve quite a considerable change in the operating practices of water companies at the moment. A large amount of their income is derived from trade effluent from business which of course can have a component of chemicals, metals or whatever. Although there are targets to reduce those, the idea that waste from a sewage farm is immediately available to be used as compost is quite idealistic in many respects because there is a mixed waste stream down that sewer; it is not all biodegradable waste by any means.

  770. Wessex Water are producing a product which appears to meet the Soil Association's regulations.
  (Ms Stupples) Wessex is in a fortunate position where a lot of its area is not a large industrial area. Avonmouth is there and you would not want to put anything on the ground from that particular area, but if you also look at the other component that goes down the sewer at the moment it is household hazardous. A lot of people, because they do not know what to do with their hazardous waste, tend to put it down the toilet or down drains and things like that, so you do have quite a quality control problem in terms of being able to know what has actually gone down the drain. I would not want to depend on that kind of large scale, quite energy intensive way of being able to deal with some food waste when there might be some smaller, local scales that would bring genuine local jobs and things that might be at least just as good, if not preferable.

  Chairman: On that note, thank you very much for your evidence.