Dr Martin Gibson, Dr Liz Goodwin, Mr Peter Laybourn and Mr Nicholas Morley

15 JANUARY 2008

  Q188  Chairman: Good morning. Could I perhaps ask you to introduce yourselves starting with Mr Laybourn?

  Mr Laybourn: Good morning. Thank you for the invitation to give evidence. Would it be possible to do a very brief introduction?

  Q189  Chairman: I do not think that is necessary. You have provided us with written evidence. We would expect you to bring out what you have to say in the responses. We are a little bit pushed for time and if we give everybody that opportunity it takes up about 15 minutes before we get started. I am sorry.

  Mr Laybourn: My name is Peter Laybourn, Director of the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme, which is a cross-sector business-led programme with about 10,000 member companies in its network.

  Dr Goodwin: My name is Liz Goodwin. I am Chief Executive of WRAP, the Waste & Resources Action Programme. We work with individuals, businesses and local authorities to reduce waste and recycle more.

  Dr Gibson: My name is Martin Gibson. I am Director of Envirowise, which is a government programme to help businesses reduce the production of waste in the first place.

  Mr Morley: My name is Nick Morley. I am Director of Sustainable Innovation at a company called Oakdene Hollins Ltd. We are a waste economics and sustainable innovation company and we also run the Centre for Remanufacturing and Reuse.

  Q190  Chairman: The cynic might say that maybe there is a bit of waste in the advice given on waste management. There seems to be the danger of overlap. How do you avoid that? Where you have a common interest between groups like yours how do you introduce clients to the other person who might be able to help? Do you work closely together? Is there a degree of overlap? How do you avoid overlapping too much and then generating your own waste as it were?

  Dr Goodwin: I think we have all got very clear remits, but we do work very closely together. In the case of both NISP and Envirowise, we have regular liaison meetings and where we identify specific areas where we are working on the same subject we work very closely together. For example, with Envirowise we are both working with the construction sector and with the retail sector and we are currently developing a joint business plan for 2008, which means that those programmes will be delivered as a single joint programme and that means that businesses will get a seamless approach when they come to see one of us and will be able to interact with both organisations.

  Dr Gibson: With NISP, for example, we have joint projects in the south-west and in the north-east. We also make sure that when our advisers are on the ground they do signpost to other organisations where necessary. It is very much our feeling that it should not matter who the company comes to or which body the company comes to, they should get the right advice and we pass them on as necessary and as appropriate.

  Mr Laybourn: We do in fact have very similar objectives but our approaches are very complementary and very different. I do believe it is a bit of an urban myth that there is an overlap here; we certainly have not found it. We are working very closely with Envirowise particularly at the regional level and we support WRAP in their excellent work on waste protocols with the Environment Agency.

  Q191  Chairman: We are not trying to promulgate myths here, we are trying to kill them! How do manufacturers learn about your activities? How successful have you been? What proportion of manufacturing enterprises do you reach and touch in your activities jointly or individually?

  Dr Gibson: I think Envirowise probably has the widest remit for contacting the businesses. We are available for use by any business in the UK, not just manufacturing. We target sectors where we think we can help the business by giving them advice so they can reduce resource use, save money and improve the environment. We do a lot of work with the industry organisations such as the Engineering Employers Federation, the Federation of Small Business and the like to get to businesses where they would normally look for advice, but we do also run marketing programmes nationwide to help draw people into the programme and then we pass them on to other programmes as necessary. Within specific sectors where we have worked for a long time we expect to be known by 40 to 50 per cent of our target market, which are all businesses over 20. Businesses smaller than that are welcome to come to us and they will get support, but we do not necessarily target them as strongly.

  Q192  Chairman: What about the other members, SMEs in particular?

  Dr Goodwin: Our work with the SMEs is generally focused around the SMEs in the recycling and reprocessing sector, we tend to focus on those organisations and we work with them over a number of years, from their business plan development and through their growth stage.

  Mr Morley: The Centre tends to use a mixture. A lot of remanufacturing companies are SMEs and therefore we work with them. In terms of our own organisation's relationship with other bodies, we sit slightly back and behind what we might call programmes that are relating to delivering things on the ground, although we do that ourselves. We tend to be doing a lot of support work for organisations like Envirowise in the remanufacturing and reuse area; that is our remit and role if you like. Yes, there are a lot of SMEs in the remanufacturing sector, which is very much a hidden sector and it is not often brought out in the general resource efficiency and recycling area.

  Mr Laybourn: The growth of our membership to approximately 10,000 since 2005 has largely been achieved by networking and business-to-business recommendations. We also work closely with some of the professional bodies such as IEMA and CIWM.

  Q193  Lord Methuen: Mr Morley, you are talking about recycling and reuse. What sort of things are your members reprocessing?

  Mr Morley: The remanufacturing industry may either be carried out by original equipment manufacturers, so it can be the person who made the equipment in the first place and a good example of that would be Rolls-Royce who remanufacture aero engines. They perhaps would not call it remanufacturing, but your aero engine goes through a number of rebuild steps both in domestic and defence terms. A very good example is Caterpillar who make earth moving equipment and also own Perkins who make diesel engines. Another model of remanufacturing is where it is carried out by small independent companies. A good example would be toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges for your printer where typically that is not carried out by Hewlett Packard or Canon or Epson but rather by small independent companies perhaps working under own-label agreements.

  Q194  Chairman: Do you think you get much positive support and assistance from the Hewlett Packards of this world in your recycling?

  Mr Morley: Are you talking here about remanufacturing, reuse?

  Q195  Chairman: Yes, that is what I am talking about.

  Mr Morley: My understanding is Hewlett Packard support recycling because obviously one can see that there is an obvious risk of cannibalising your own sales with remanufactured product. If you solely manufacture products you want people to buy a new Hewlett Packard inkjet cartridge. Some original equipment manufacturers engage with remanufacturing and either carry it out themselves or contract it out to independents and are quite pro it. Other original equipment manufacturers are very anti it because they see it cannibalising sales and definitely do not want it, and there is a bit of a war going on where they do not want to see it happen.

  Chairman: There was a programme on You and Yours during the recess that drew attention to the fact that Hewlett Packard would always be as happy for you to buy a new photocopier or computer printer rather than actually buying some of their ink because it was cheaper to get it in that form. I am led to believe the European Commission is having an inquiry into what some would regard as rip-offs. I have just put in a cartridge that was recycled, but every time I switch the thing on I have to press a button to shut out something from Hewlett Packard telling me to realign and it is just a real nuisance. It seemed to me to be a punishment for being a recycler rather than a purchaser of Hewlett Packard's equipment.

  Q196  Lord Crickhowell: What more could be done to increase awareness of waste reduction as a business opportunity?

  Dr Goodwin: I think a lot can be done right from the basic level of more case studies. As we all work with organisations we produce a lot of case studies. To really embed change you actually need to look at other ways of getting the message to a very wide audience and because that audience is so broad that can be quite a challenge. In particular we work with some of the major retailers and major construction sector clients. We then rely on them to drive through the supply chain to raise the awareness with all the SMEs that they engage with as part of their supply chain and we find that is a very effective way of getting that message across.

  Dr Gibson: I think another way of doing it is to change some of the language used. We are here talking about waste reduction, but the benefit to business comes from reducing resource use. In the previous session I noticed Mr Glass was talking about the fact that many companies can benefit by reducing resource use, but if you look at waste, it tends to be done at an operational level far removed from management whereas resources tend to be a management issue. If we want to engage in the sort of cultural change and the sort of change in behaviour needed to reduce resource wastage then we need to make it more of a management issue. I would say perhaps we need to stop talking about waste and start talking about resource inefficiency. There are a lot of successful single issue marketing campaigns. We have noticed that businesses are taking on the idea of footprinting, particularly with respect to carbon and that is working very positively at the moment, with senior management aware as well as operational staff, but there is a danger there that they can be too narrow. So carbon footprinting can often stop at direct energy use whereas the largest carbon footprint for most companies is in the resources that they are using, the materials. We need to expand that so they understand that material use is very important and there are benefits to reducing it. In the waste area, recycling is an area where we have a very simple good message and people are increasing their recycling, but again the benefits to the business and environmentally come from reducing resource use in the first place. So if we can move them on now from recycling to making sure that they use everything efficiently then that would be an excellent idea. Let me just use the example of paper. A lot of companies are now recycling paper, but if you look in their recycling bins, they have only printed on one side, whereas if they had printed on two sides they could almost half the amount of paper they use in the first place. That is the sort of thinking we need to bring across.

  Mr Morley: We have just completed a study for Defra looking at some quick wins in resource efficiency, low cost and no cost improvements and how they can be done. One of the outputs of that study is that the companies that make the most use of business support services to reduce waste are those companies that are already performing well. It is the well-performing businesses that take advantage of waste reduction opportunities. I think there is the interesting question of how you reach the laggards and the less well-performing businesses. I think there may be opportunities through benchmarking, through maybe trying different routes into those businesses perhaps with the finance sector, for example, because often they perceive themselves as performing quite well when in fact they are laggards in terms of overall business resource efficiency.

  Mr Laybourn: I think I can give a very good example there, which is the NISP programme presenting itself as a business opportunity programme. This year we diverted something like 2 million tonnes away from landfill at a cost of 17p a tonne. I think it is also about working, as I mentioned, with the professional bodies. The Business Links who are under the remit of the Regional Development Agencies, have an important job to do for the future to get this business case across. I would also like to put in a word for the BREW Centre for Local Authorities who can distribute best practice out of the local authority in a very effective and efficient manner.

  Q197  Lord Crickhowell: I suppose it is inevitable that when we start posing this question you come up with some proposals which suggest that the Government should do more in one way or another by providing incentives. I notice that WRAP says that a variable value added tax with a lower VAT for products that are more sustainable would be a good idea. I think you might have some difficulty in getting it past the European Community. I am not at all clear how such a system could be anything but complex because presumably you have to start by having some pretty clear definitions of what are more sustainable before you start taxing people at different levels in a way that would be deemed acceptable. Is this really a serious proposal?

  Dr Goodwin: I think it is an option. You would then start to work with people like BSI to define some of those standards and specifications. Another option we have been talking to the retailers about through the Courtauld Commitment is to specify recycled content in packaging. The retail sector is a huge market and a huge pool of recycled materials can go back into the economy through simple things like specifying 50 per cent recycled content on all their plastic packaging. That would provide an enormous market for plastics.

  Q198  Lord Crickhowell: Let us pursue this a little because you have put it forward as a specific proposal. Have you actually worked out a workable scheme for a variable VAT which would be taken seriously by any Treasury team or Chancellor of the Exchequer?

  Dr Goodwin: No, we have not.

  Q199  Lord Crickhowell: It seems to me that if we are going to put forward a proposal like that, which would be a pretty significant sort of proposal, it has got to be realistic, has it not?

  Dr Goodwin: Yes, it has. It is something we have talked to colleagues in Defra about and something we have talked to businesses we work with about, on whether or not that sort of approach might work. We certainly have not worked it out in any detail.