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Achieving a quality product is contested?

Recycling schemes have taken a very public battering in recent weeks. But, as Veolia’s Paul Levett tells Simeon Goldstein, there are plenty of ways public confidence can be regained.

It’s against this background that Packaging News has secured an exclusive interview with Paul Levett, deputy chief executive director of Veolia Environmental Services, located in the aforementioned church on Pentonville Road.

Levett is unrepentant in his defence of co-mingled collections, and sorting at a materials reprocessing facility (MRF), as the best way to improve recycling in the UK. In most circumstances, the co-mingled route is the preferred option for collecting waste as you’ll definitely get a higher yield, he says.

Levett says that the stockpiling of material happens at peak times of the year as most MRFs are located in urban areas – so as to be close to the waste – and consequently are short of space. In terms of volumes, immediately after Christmas would be the peak time. And there’s also the fact that the materials are of a different mix than during the rest of the year, meaning we need to recalibrate some of the equipment.

Nonetheless, Levett is convinced that co-mingled collections will be the most effective way to meet European recycling targets of 50% by 2010 – the UK currently recycles around 34% – because it makes it easy for consumers. To get to 34%, without underplaying the efforts that have been made, it’s been about converting the believers. To get to 50%, and beyond, we have to convince the agnostics; those people who don’t really care about recycling, he says.

Collection confusion

Confronting a household with seven different-coloured boxes is confusing, he suggests. And there is also the question about what happens if the box that is due for collection on a Friday is full by Tuesday.

With co-mingled, all you need is one bin for recycled material and one for residual waste. There is also the health and safety aspect for the waste collectors. Large containers mean our operators have to cross the road less, and wheelie bins don’t need to be lifted as the lorry takes care of it, he says.

Veolia Environmental Services has around 180 refuse collection, recycling and street cleaning contracts with local authorities and waste disposal authorities across the country. It also has a number of energy from waste and composting facilities, and has been heavily involved in the setting of up of the Closed Loop London recycling plant in Dagenham.

Levett argues that a greater degree of standardisation across different areas of the country would make things easier. It’s difficult to believe that we need hundreds of variations, although imposing national standards on local politicians probably wouldn’t be popular, he says.

He adds that having a range of services is also a missed opportunity to consolidate reprocessing, particularly if a county council is responsible for disposing of waste from a number of collecting district authorities. If each district in an area does things differently, when it comes to reprocessing you’re not going to get economies of scale and the lowest cost solution. You can’t build a single MRF, because the inputs are all different, says Levett.

Plastics push

One of the most confusing types of packaging for consumers to recycle is the wide variety of plastics. Levett believes this is another argument for co-mingled. If we can say they can put any plastic food container in the box, it would improve yields, so would reduced use of multiple polymers in a single pack, which are almost impossible to economically separate, he says. Of course, accepting all plastics would require changes to be made at the MRFs, and the timing is not great as material prices are low at the moment. We need to wait for prices to recover, which should happen this year, although they are unlikely to return to the levels at the start of 2008.

Another possible development could be the introduction of colour-sorting technology for glass, suggests Levett, although the price has got to be right. If the financial case was strong enough to go down the better environmental route, companies like ours would be keen to invest in the technology, he says.

Colour separation of glass is about generating good quality material for reprocessing – a point on which the co-mingled and
single-stream collection lobbies agree.

Levett suggests that quality is set to be an even more important issue as higher levels of recycling increase the supply of recovered materials, allowing buyers to become more selective. However, he believes it is commercial factors, rather than quality, that are driving support for single-stream collections. Co-mingled tends to be processed through MRFs and for the export market. If it doesn’t go through a MRF it would be a cheaper input for paper mills, for example, which are strong supporters of single-stream collections, he says.

Levett believes the current negative view of waste collections is due to the press taking a couple of issues and blowing them out of proportion. And his biggest concern is the amount of misinformation about waste the public takes as gospel. Everyone understands the benefits of recycling. But if people think they go to the trouble to clean and sort their waste and it then gets dumped in landfill, then they’re quite rightly concerned, says Levett. No-one in the waste sector would dispute that. The problem is getting the media to sing from a different hymn sheet.

SINGLE-MINDED

The bottom line is co-mingled collections, as they are currently being carried out, do not produce materials of a good quality for reprocessors, and the current stockpiling is a stark testimony to that, says Phil Hurst, spokesman for the Campaign for Real Recycling (CRR).

CRR’s aim is to convince central and local government that the best way to ensure high quality materials are reprocessed is through investment in source-separated collections, whereby waste is separated at the kerbside. Hurst says that, despite the economic slowdown, the market for certain materials is holding up well. There’s a problem in steel, but other metals are not doing so badly. Paper mills are working and a large number are set to come on line this year. But they want a certain level of quality, and if they can’t get it here they’ll look overseas, he says.

Hurst says the media reports of stockpiling of materials are dissuading people from putting waste for collection, but that source-separated materials wouldn’t be stockpiled. People are thinking that they don’t need to bother recycling because the waste is not reprocessed, he adds.

CRR is also keen to dispel the image of source-sorted recycling as requiring a lot of different bins. It’s usually two bins, and the material is separated by the side of the road. You don’t need to separate and eco-police and people can’t say it’s not being treated as valuable material, adds Hurst.

Hurst agrees with Veolia’s Levett that recycling would benefit from greater standardisation, but that the needs of the reprocessor should be the starting point on which the system is based. The nuances of why your neighbour has a different system to you are lost on the general public, and there’s definitely a case to narrow the range of collections available.

ENERGETIC DEBATE

While the UK seems sold on recycling, whether single-stream or co-mingled, there is much less support for energy-from-waste (EfW) facilities, which Levett puts down to people associating EfW with incinerators from 40 to 50 years ago.

Veolia has six energy recovery plants in the UK, with a total capacity of 1.4m tonnes a year. And the firm is keen to point out that current regulations for emissions from incinerators are probably much tighter than any other comparable sector.

For waste that can’t be recycled, EfW makes a lot of sense and the energy security argument is a very strong one, says Levett. But it’s unpopular as nobody wants to live next to a waste facility of any sort.