Mr Rick Hindley, Dr Michael Pitts, Mr Will Savage and Mr David Workman

22 JANUARY 2008

  Q280  Lord Crickhowell: That is very nice for you, but very few local authorities are like that. What are we to do about this because this is a slightly absurd position? What ought we to be recommending in this instance?

  Mr Hindley: Aluminium has obviously been identified as a key material in the Government's Waste Strategy which was announced last year, and quite rightly, because of the huge environmental benefits of recycling. The challenge we have is that aluminium packaging arises almost exclusively in the domestic waste stream; it is very thinly spread, there are no big chunks of it. We are almost totally dependent on local authorities to collect it. We have already talked this morning about the fact that local authorities are driven by the Landfill Directive which is focused on the reduction of biodegradable waste going to landfill by weight and they have penalties of £150 a tonne for missing their target. Aluminium, although very high value, is not high in their priorities. We only represent less than one per cent of the domestic waste stream and so we are not a priority. The vast majority of local authorities who operate kerbside collection programmes now do collect aluminium as part of that and in fact I think around 50 per cent of them collect aluminium foil as well.

  Q281  Baroness Platt of Writtle: Our local authority also separate steel from aluminium.

  Mr Hindley: At the sorting centres that is normally done through a magnet and that is obviously important to the recycling process. In answer to your question, we would like to see an incentive which focuses local authorities on collecting light weight packaging like aluminium where there are big carbon benefits. Going back to a point that was made earlier, we would certainly welcome and look forward to working with the Government on developing some carbon based target for local authorities which incentivised the collection of packaging. We did note that that was in the Waste Strategy, but we have not yet seen any evidence of any thinking behind it.

  Q282  Lord Crickhowell: We have already talked about one aspect of the UK legislation which is causing wrong effects. What about financial problems? Is there any UK legislation affecting the financial competitiveness of the British industry compared with its competitors overseas?

  Mr Workman: I would go back to a comment I made earlier on about the costs of manufacture being significantly reduced if you can gather enough cullet or waste glass to put back into the furnace. Otherwise, you are relying on virgin raw materials, which are expensive, and you are using a lot more energy. There will be a competitive element to that. One of the things that we have been lobbying on for years and years and years now is the way in which the Waste Strategy in this country has been implemented, which allows local authorities, sometimes neighbouring local authorities, to pursue completely different strategies. One can understand that London and the Outer Hebrides might want to have slightly different strategies. Even within London you get some local authorities who collect some materials and other local authorities will collect others, they use different coloured bins, they have a completely different attitude towards recycling and that is one of the reasons why the public have not taken to it in the UK in the way that they might have done in some countries on the Continent where there is much more uniformity of approach.

  Q283  Baroness Platt of Writtle: How, if at all, can producers influence manufacturers to use their materials or chemicals in a sustainable way?

  Dr Pitts: We covered some of these points earlier. A simpler way of communicating life-cycle thinking and identifying hotspots along supply chains is extremely important. This notion of responsibility and in some cases shared responsibility among supply chains is very important. Our colleagues at the Chemical Industries Association have gone some way towards this with their Responsible Care Programme. REACH legislation is something that is affecting all European businesses now and this may cause supply chains to start working together on not only the cost of registering substances but how they innovate to discover new ways to provide the product or service avoiding using chemicals that are now effectively banned. This is where the Knowledge Transfer Network comes in. One of the things we try to do is understand where cross-sectoral learning is to be had. I think the auto industry can teach us a lot about these kind of things. There are very close working relationships between Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers in the auto industry as I understand it. Again, coming back to earlier points this morning, the Japanese are well ahead of this in the auto industry, they set the benchmarks now for how these things are done.

  Lord Lewis of Newnham: We have nobody here from the plastics industry and yet we are being told constantly that plastics are becoming a major problem. You are transferring aluminium to plastics because of the weight problem, which is quite serious. I think it is a point we have got to address in this report. It does seem to me that in the plastics industry we have an equal problem and that is "sealactivity" of the plastics themselves. If plastics could be separated into PVC and polyethylene and things like this then there is a much greater possibility of recycling, but at the moment where you mix them, as with your bottles, the best thing to do as far as I am concerned is burn the stuff.

  Q284  Baroness Platt of Writtle: The glass industry, the aluminium industry and the chemical industry have organisations where you bring manufacturers together. How can we encourage co-operation between all businesses within a product's life-cycle to share information and use materials more sustainably?

  Dr Pitts: I will try and represent plastics. With green design principles, you need to start to understand the impact different plastics can have and look at the life-cycle; which ones are easier to recycle than others. This kind of thinking is starting to predominate. Materials UK, another organisation that represents part of the chemical industry, specifically materials and plastics, is working very hard to educate designers as to which are the best ones, plastics or materials, to use for a different purpose with the thought of being able to reuse or recycle it at the end as well. The weight-based targets we have heard about do cause a problem in this. Of the seven different types, only the very high density plastics are recycled, types one and two. The weight-based target discourages low density plastic recycling. We possibly need targets based on the environmental impact, toxicity or volume.

  Mr Workman: The work that WRAP has undertaken with the glass industry has actually brought brand owners, retailers and the glass industry together for the first time. It is fundamentally important from our point of view that, despite the WRAP cutback in funding, those projects continue because they are beginning to make some difference in terms of waste.

  Mr Hindley: One of the problems we face in the metals industry. We have been identified as a key material, that is aluminium, but to date WRAP has had no brief on metals and so the support that the glass industry has had and the plastics industry has had has not been replicated with metals. There are a number of different areas where we could really benefit from support. Despite our voicing our concerns to Defra and BERR it does not appear that anything has happened. A key opportunity for us would be to work with WRAP and obtain Government support through WRAP to solve some of the issues that we face.

  Chairman: I think we have got your message! I am sure we will take that and other points up. If you wish to submit anything in addition, we would be very pleased to have it. Thank you very much for your very fulsome and remarkably concise answers given that each of you had something different to add to most of the questions. We got through an awful lot very quickly. Thank you very much for your co-operation.