Lee Marshall, Director of Innovation and Technical Services at CIWM, considers what the new Government means for the waste and recycling sector.

Now the dust has settled on the General Election, and we have the new Labour Government, do we have a sense of what is to come in the next five years yet?

There have been a couple of early signs, with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) announcing five priorities, one of which is to ‘create a roadmap to move Britain to a zero waste economy’. They have also announced an urgent review of the current Environment Improvement Plan (EIP) that will be finished by the end of the year. And in announcing the portfolios of the Defra ministers, there is no mention of resources and waste. Instead, the Minster for Nature, Mary Creagh, has amongst her responsibilities ‘circular economy’. So already there feels like a different tone from this Government.

During the election period, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) published 10 policy asks for the sector that it believed a new Government should look to implement. These came from a review of the current Resources and Waste Strategy that was published back in 2018. The review showed that progress on implementing the policies in that strategy has been slow, with only eight fully implemented, 21 partially and another 10 not implemented. Since 2018 things have moved on and discussion now focuses more on net zero and circular economy than on recycling.

The first ask from CIWM was production of a resource resilience strategy that would feed into a new circular economy plan that should sit alongside the current 25-year Environment Plan. The resource resilience strategy should have two main aims: delivering a circular economy and helping the UK achieve net zero. The strategy should then contain the other nine asks that CIWM highlighted. This doesn’t mean ignoring the current strategy though, and we believe an immediate action for the new government is to implement consistent collections and packaging extended producer responsibility (EPR) and then alongside those digital waste tracking and reforms to carriers, brokers and dealers. These two sets of policy changes have already had a lot of work done on them and provide foundations for future changes to take place.

While the fact that Defra has a lead on circular economy is encouraging, it will take input and policies from several other government departments for true progress to be made. To help this, CIWM believes there is a need for a cross departmental task force on resource resilience, aimed at helping to build a resource resilient UK and progress policies on net zero and climate change. Such a taskforce could also have a large input into the review of the EIP that the Government is undertaking before the year is out.

Although not a direct ‘waste policy’ the next area CIWM have urged action on is around green skills. This is a policy area CIWM has done a lot of work on in the past three years. The sector is constantly evolving, and the skills and jobs needed in the future are going to be different to those we have now. It means we need to make the sector attractive to new entrants as well as upskilling the great people we already have. Again, there are encouraging early signs with an announcement from the Government about Skills England and a growth and skills levy.

Other policy asks from CIWM include targets on reuse and repair, use of economic instruments and strengthening eco design. These are backed up by a call for the extension of EPR to more products, including Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), mattresses and batteries. CIWM recently published a research report calling for EPR on everything, starting with batteries. The research looked at public attitudes to batteries recycling and disposal and found high instances of the wrong actions being taken. It also established that there is a public appetite for a deposit on batteries to help increase recycling and this is something CIWM would want the Government to implement. Batteries are causing big issue for the sector and changes need to happen.

So, the messages in the short term are implement consistent collections and packaging EPR, and introduce digital waste tracking and the carriers, brokers and dealers reform from the existing strategy. Set up the task force to progress resource resilience and the zero waste economy and then work on the skills agenda. After years of delay some early action will gain the new government a lot of good will.

This article was originally published by LAPV.