MR BOB LISNEY, MR MARTIN CHARTER, DR TIM COOPER AND PROFESSOR SIMON POLLARD

11 DECEMBER 2007

  Q67Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen. May I welcome you to the Committee. Would you like to introduce yourselves for the record.

  Professor Pollard: My Lord Chairman, good morning. My name is Professor Simon Pollard. I am Head of Sustainable Systems at Cranfield University.

  Dr Cooper: Good morning, my Lord Chairman. My name is Tim Cooper. I am Head of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University.

  Mr Charter: My name is Martin Charter. I am a Director of The Centre for Sustainable Design at UCCA.

  Mr Lisney: I am Bob Lisney. I run my own company called LRL Consultancy Services, which is an environmental consultancy. Before I set that up I was Assistant Director at Hampshire County Council involved with the environment and natural resources.

  Q68  Chairman: How does waste reduction fit into the concept of resource efficiency?

  Professor Pollard: Maybe I will offer some thoughts. I think resource efficiency is about doing more for less. If we are producing more waste—and waste, I guess, is widely regarded as something we do not want—then our efficiency is low; so we are interested more than anything in processes that help improve resource efficiency. I think there are a number of concepts (some of those in design, some of those in production, some of those about recycling and the commodity market) that we should perhaps pull together in order to improve resource efficiency in the UK. Certainly there is the concept of better design, environmentally sensitive design, better selection of materials, opportunity for concepts such as product lightweighting, and design for disassembly; in other words designed to improve opportunities for remanufacturing. In terms of production and manufacture, there are opportunities with respect to lean manufacturing and dematerialisation; and concepts such as the six sigma concept, which is about production performance and reliability. A further aspect in terms of improving resource efficiency and reducing waste concerns repositioning our relationship between consumers and products, and I am sure this is something my colleagues will comment on. We do need to incentivise and continue to push recycling, of course; and there has been tremendous work done by government and local authorities over recent years on that front. We need to open up and create the commodity markets for recyclate as well. There are a number of strategies here, I believe, that belong in different communities: the design community; production and management; waste management and amongst consumers. Where we have not been very successful to date, in my view, is in pulling these strands together in a practical combined strategy for dematerialisation. I think that is the central challenge ahead of us.

  Q69  Chairman: Are there circumstances where waste reduction strategies are more bother than they are worth, in that they can, as it were, negatively impact upon resource efficiency?

  Professor Pollard: Nothing immediately comes to mind with respect to that. What I would say is there is not always an obvious connection. For example, we have done work at Cranfield with respect to product lightweighting. This is about making products lighter and pulling materials out of products. Here we would naturally think this was an opportunity to reduce waste, and yet for some light materials there are not waste recycling schemes or systems available; so there is a mismatch between the desire to remove materials and the availability of recycling opportunities later downstream. I think it is another example of trade-offs and disconnects between the desire to improve design and the downstream capabilities and systems for recycling. As I said previously, in my view we need to pull all these things together in a coherent whole, and we have not done that to-date. I do not know if colleagues have other views.

  Dr Cooper: My Lord Chairman, could I just add something to that. The connection is that there is an inverse relationship between increased efficiency and waste, in that increased efficiency demands a reduction in waste. If we are getting waste we are not getting the maximum value possible out of resources. My area of interest in particular is the lifespan of a product. It seems to me self-evident that if a product of a specific weight lasts twice as long as another—whether this is due to better design quality or whether it is due to user behaviour, because obviously consumers affect the lifespan of products—then it is twice as efficient in terms of resource use. Strategies that focus on the lifespan of goods combine increased resource efficiency with, at the end of the pipe, less waste.

  Q70  Lord Haskel: My question was really stimulated by the point that there are so many different aspects of this. You were saying there is no disconnect. Is there any way of making some sort of comparison? For instance, if you want to compare one way of saving waste from another, do you do it by grading them by the energy that has gone into it? Do you grade it by the money that has gone into it? Do you grade it by the raw materials which have gone into it? How do you make the comparison?

  Professor Pollard: In academic terms people think in terms of resource efficiency, in terms of the materials requirement, of product compared to raw materials used. That is a mass balance, a mass ratio.

  Q71  Lord Haskel: So the kilos of raw material?

  Professor Pollard: Yes, that is right, in terms of materials. However, if you were to talk to manufacturers, of course, they are interested in cost reduction. They see waste as cost and they are interested in stripping that cost out of their manufacturing system. They need a different metric. Because no one individual person in the lifecycle of a product has complete ownership from materials extraction, through manufacture, through use, you have a number of communities and different audiences to stimulate with respect to removing waste. They need different metrics because they are incentivised by different aspects of the problem—whether it is materials going in, whether it is cost, whether it is the actual amount of recyclate at the end. I am not convinced necessarily that one single metric is appropriate for the full set of audiences in the lifecycle.

  Dr Cooper: My Lord Chairman, I agree with that last answer, and I would particularly highlight the idea that we need a complementary approach. The fact that a product is resource-efficient does not necessarily mean that it is economically efficient. For example, you can have products that are disposable which are more expensive in resource terms than in economic terms. For example, a disposable product that is relatively cheap may be using resources inefficiently, wasting resources, because those resources are under-priced.

  Q72  Lord Lewis of Newnham: It strikes me that one of my problems is simply that you can isolate what is the problem involved, but it is really the solution we are looking for. What is the incentive for the manufacturer to actually deal with the problem in the way you are envisaging it? After all, Mr Charter has reported here it brings out the very interesting effect of looking at the end-of-life vehicles and comparing that with the WEEE Directive. Here in the WEEE Directive, as I think you rightly point out, the incentives for the producer have been, in my mind, significantly reduced for him or her to get involved in the recycling process of bringing the thing back, as it were, to base one. What is the incentive to a manufacturer to actually consider waste? At the end of the day their major concern must be profit, and they are not necessarily in the same vein. I would like to ask what your views would be on that?

  Mr Charter: Just picking up a couple of points there. There is a scenario where you can see if a product was moving towards increased miniaturisation and less material maybe that might make recycling less economically viable for the recycling sector. That is one scenario in relation to the previous conversation. Coming back to your point there in terms of economic incentives, you are seeing a number of the major manufacturers, particularly in electronics which I know more about, having been applying so-called eco-design or "design for environment" approaches for ten to 15 years and going through various iterations of knowledge. Once they start to look, for example, at older products they may have 100 screws in them and if they start to look through this lens it enables them to look differently, and maybe they only need ten screws, or something like this, which maybe makes both the manufacturing assembly as well as the potential disassembly more economically viable. Particularly looking at the case of Philips, for example, who in their latest sustainability report have actually identified that ten per cent of global revenue now is from their so-called green flagship products, of which one of the strategies they use is materials reduction.

  Q73  Lord Lewis of Newnham: Could I just add to the question: there was a survey done a number of years ago about buying products, and the general view was that everything else being equal people would buy the green product; if it was more expensive, however, they rarely would buy the green product. At the end of the day it is the balance sheet that would influence a manufacturer. The number of screws being reduced from 100 to ten must benefit the manufacturer in addition. Really the question is when it is not—when there is an incentive to actually consider the waste as the primary, if not the secondary. The packaging industry, for instance, has had this imposed upon them because of the taxation system. Is that the way you should deal with it?

  Mr Charter: Personally I think there are different types of buyers: business to business; business to government; business to consumers. Often we see maybe five per cent of consumers buy greener, all things being equal, and there is an issue there. Another hobbyhorse of mine—it is not just consumers, it is business buyers. If you are buying capital equipment maybe there is an economic argument for a smaller footprint of your product as well.

  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: I wanted to pick up the earlier point about different communities and not being brought together. I see the importance of that but I would not want to assume, and I am not sure if you are assuming, that there is a single matrix that we would use to measure what the problem is and what the answer is; because it does really depend on the kind of question you are asking. If what you want is the product that produces the maximum profit, you will get one set of answers, and there may be more screws or not depending on how easy it is to put it together and how long it takes.

  Lord May of Oxford: If I may interrupt. It seems to me one of the besetting sins is there are no screws at all so you cannot fix it!

  Q74  Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: You lose your Allen keys as well, do you! Another possibility has to do with scarce materials. If you have a scarce material clearly you want to conserve that and use it in the most efficient way you can. The third one, and the one that is bound to preoccupy us, not least because the Climate Change Bill has started going through this House, is the use of energy and its impact on the climate. These will produce different answers, and different kinds and different definitions of waste will come out of those. Anything you could say that would help us to clarify these different types of approach to waste would be helpful.

  Mr Lisney: I take the view that already we have a number of regulation and fiscal instruments coming through, and coming through with an impact and the market is working. I think we have got to look upstream really at what I would call "resource management" rather than "resource efficiency". I think this whole agenda is about using our resources in a managed way and a way we have not had to do before. The reason I think companies, producers and retailers will look at this is because the costs of waste are increasing substantially; and that is because of regulation and fiscal reasons. Within two or three years, the Landfill Tax, for example, is very high. Energy you have just mentioned—those costs are going up; and also we have a substantial demand now and interest in looking at energy schemes which we did not have only a relatively short period of time away. The challenge, it seems to me, for resource management is about making judgments about how you are going to use resources through your society. There will be times when you will want to collect those resources for very good reasons—scarcity, costs and so on—and also sometimes when you will use those resources for energy, because that also represents a good use for the community. The challenges we have, it seems to me, are twofold: one is the horizontal supply chain to get some degree of balance; and then what I would call "vertical governance" whereby in terms of meeting timescales and targets we have got to look at how do we mobilise sectors of society and get that interlink between producers and consumers. I think those things represent what Simon said about the myriad of different people, the matrix. We are effectively managing complexity really, and there is not a one-size-fits-all, but there probably is a one-direction-and-leadership which fits all.

  Q75  Baroness Platt of Writtle: In talking about the possible fight between maximum profit and minimum waste, I think one of the difficult things is fashion—not just clothes but fashion in all sorts of equipment. One only has to look at mobile phones and people are buying new things when they do not really need them because they are being marketed very hard.

  Dr Cooper: I think this is an area where, upon reflection, the Waste Strategy, which was published earlier this year, does not actually get to the core of some of the economic drivers that lead to waste. I think the Government is right to be proud of the fact that household waste is now down to about half a per cent per year, whereas a few years ago it was rising at three per cent a year. Until it actually develops some more sophisticated analysis of the links between economic growth and waste growth, however, we will not actually crack the nut and achieve a significant reduction in waste. I would hope that there would be more work on areas like fashion. As you rightly say, it is affecting a whole range of products. I worry when with my students these days that my glasses appear rather out-of-date because they are not quite wide enough along the side! It is also a serious point as well, that these things have got to change in our culture if we are to move away from a throwaway culture to one that is more sustainable.

  Q76  Lord May of Oxford: Perhaps a different way of asking some of these questions is to ask to what extent do designers and engineers take into account the whole-life and especially the end-of-life impacts of the choices they make in materials and the product design? Insofar as the answer to that is not to much extent, why is that? What are the things that inhibit people from looking at things in this larger perspective?

  Mr Charter: I think we have to split up between product designers and design engineers, firstly. What I tend to see from my experience is where people are doing this they tend to be design engineers and they tend to be in the big companies. Some of those are doing it because they see a business argument; some of those are seeing pressures both from legislation and now increasingly, in the FMCG, from the big retailers. That now is starting to really create some big pressures I know from some companies. The next issue is you get down to the level of the SMEs and there is a virtual zero awareness and understanding of so-called eco-design, and that is global. We have been working in China and India trying to introduce some of this thinking and it is a global problem[14]. Why? Firstly, because the drivers maybe are not strong enough and are not getting passed through the supply chains; secondly, it is generally not integrated into the education systems, whether it is product design or design engineering. Related to these issues, what you tend to see globally is a few active small research groups in universities that then spin-off modules in courses, not a systematic approach.

  Q77Lord May of Oxford: If I could paraphrase the answer to make sure I have understood. You are saying you think it is a mixture of the things that both help and there is not enough so they hinder, a mixture of regulation and fashion; but also the fact the way designers talk maybe does not emphasise this enough. Taking the second of those first, what more do you think could be done? Are there ways we could alter the way designers talk?

  Mr Charter: I would say the major professional bodies both covering product design and design engineering need to have coverage of issues in mission statements, and that they do not just go up and down on the agenda, or become "flavour of the month". For example, the Design Council has shown no leadership in this area and needs to. I would like to see more initiatives like the Royal Academy of Engineering's on professorships related to sustainable engineering. The Deans of the design schools and the engineering schools really need to get exposed to some of this thinking because it is becoming real, business driven.

  Q78  Lord May of Oxford: Going a bit off-piste, may it not be that too much of what we call "design" is a subject inhabited by people with no background in science, so you have a bit of a two-cultures problem?

  Mr Charter: I think again splitting between the two domains, the product designers and the design engineers, I think maybe the engineers get more exposed to the science; but maybe the product designers, who often are those charged with coming up with the new solutions, are absolutely scared of the science; they do not like it; they would run away from it for as long as they could if they possibly could.

  Professor Pollard: My Lord Chairman, the Cox Report has considered some of these issues between design and manufacture and we are now seeing a number of initiatives funded, for example, by the Higher Education Funding Council for England that are deliberately looking to put designers alongside production engineers, people that deal with materials, people that deal with environmental impacts. Indeed Cranfield has been lucky enough to be in receipt of funding for a creative design initiative that will allow us to put the design community alongside polymer and composite specialists, alongside our colleagues in production, engineering and alongside those who have to deal with issues of resource efficiency/end-of-life. These types of initiative I think are extremely valuable because they allow colleagues to speak together about their combined problems.

  Q79  Lord Haskel: It seems to me there are two aspects of design and we are talking about one aspect only. The aspect we are talking about is this business of designing products so that it uses less materials, less screws et cetera; but there is another aspect of design and that is making the product attractive so that it sells. What is being done to try and bring these two things together, because one without the other is not going to be an awful lot of use?

  Dr Cooper: One area that is gaining a lot of attention, quite properly, at the moment is design for attachment, or design for emotional attachment. There is a core group of designers, many of them are based in the Netherlands, including a network called Eternally Yours that sprang up in the early 1990s, and a young designer called Jonathan Chapman who has written a book called Emotionally Durable Design. They are looking at how to make products that have a reduced environmental impact, in that they are long-lasting and therefore (to go back to what I said earlier) resource-efficient, but also they are the kind of products that people want to keep, and here is a link with commercial success. I think there are too many products in the market that are barely designed at all, that are just put together. Such products have relatively short life spans and are thus inefficient in their resource use. I think there are real commercial opportunities that will bring together resource efficiency, quality and attractiveness in terms of aesthetics. Some of the work that is going on, in particular by these Dutch researchers, concerns how to create within products a sense that they are irreplaceable. We did some research at my university which found that a third of appliances that are discarded still function. They may be attractive at the point of sale but people still get fed up with them. What these young designers are looking at is how can we make products that people want to keep? It involves things like, for example, design for flexibility—so you can change the veneer of the product. It involves design for upgradeability—so you can keep in touch with the latest technology and make sure your product functions as well as other products. I think designers are looking in these areas, and there are commercial opportunities to be exploited.