Government to offer voluntary recycling deals to businesses
September 10, 2010 at 3:55 pm
The government is planning to take a new direction when it comes to controlling the amount of waste produced by businesses. Rather than introducing further legislation and fines for businesses that don’t comply, it wants to introduce a voluntary deal instead.
The announcement was made by Lord Henley, the waste and recycling minister, whilst he was visiting the SITA UK plant. He said that voluntary responsibility deals are the government’s preferred option to reduce waste and improve recycling rates in the UK without having to introduce new laws.
The most well-known voluntary agreement up to now has been the Courtauld Commitment. This was introduced in the grocery sector in 2005 and proved to be very successful. Using this example the government now wants to show that the same principle can be applied to other sectors.
This is not a new idea as it was actually mentioned in the Conservative Party’s manifesto in the lead up to the general election, but now Lord Henley has made it clear that we could see progress in the near future.
Henley’s exact words were that the government wants businesses to “do the right thing” rather than having to be “tied down or penalised with excessive rules and regulations.”
Businesses in the UK create almost twice as much waste as households so it is even more important to get them to take greater responsibility for it. The government is likely to encourage competition between companies using incentives for reduced waste and increased recycling rates. The government is also hoping that businesses will come forward with their own proposals for change.
Sainsbury’s to offer mobile-phone charger recycling
September 3, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Sainsbury’s has added another notch to its environmental bow with the introduction of a new recycling scheme for mobile-phone chargers. Throughout August 2010, customers will be able to take their old mobile-phone chargers to any Sainsbury’s store and deposit them to be sent for recycling.
Although mobile-phone recycling has become something of a boom industry in the last few years, phone chargers have been largely forgotten. This is due to the fact that they are more difficult to recycle, and there is also no money involved for recycling an old charger.
As a result, estimates put the figure of unused chargers in the UK at about 20 million – that’s about 5,000 tonnes of waste cluttering up drawers across the nation.
The supermarket is the perfect place to get rid of the old chargers as people have become used to recycling other objects there. Sainsbury’s already has schemes for the recycling of mobile phones and sat navs, so this is yet another positive addition.
It comes as part of the supermarket’s initiative called ‘Make the Difference Days’, and will come to an end on August 28. By this time the supermarket hopes to have collected about 150,000 chargers from both its customers and its employees.
The property director at Sainsbury’s, Neil Sachdev, said that they were hoping to “raise awareness of charger recycling facilities” at the same time as saving about “40 tonnes of waste from going to landfill”.
He highlighted the fact that only 280,000 chargers are currently recycled annually, so if they manage to hit their target of 150,000 they could increase these recycling rates by more than 50%.
Phone recycling companies to check for stolen handsets
August 23, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Recycling your mobile phone when you want to get your hands on the latest model is a great idea. However, it’s now become so easy to benefit financially from the practice that mobile-phone recycling firms have had to admit to the problem of mobile-phone thieves taking advantage of the service.
About 100,000 stolen handsets are sent to recycling firms every year according to estimates, worth a combined value of £4 million.
The problem is that even if mobile handsets are blocked from UK networks after they have been reported as stolen, they can still be used overseas where many of the recycled handsets end up.
It seems the ability to get easy money with no questions asked has proved too easy for thieves: until now, that is.
Mobile-phone recycling companies have just signed up to a new code of conduct to reduce the number of stolen mobile phones being recycled.
From now on companies will check the phones they receive against the National Mobile Phone Register. If they find any stolen phones they will report them to police. The register is formed of three separate databases which should provide a good level of protection.
Over 15 firms have signed up to the code of conduct at the time of writing, making up 90% of the industry.
Charlo Carabott, the managing director of Mazuma Mobile, is quoted by the BBC, admitting that the high prices it was offering for old mobiles “could encourage people to go out and steal handsets,” and although the company had taken its own precautions from the beginning, this was an important milestone as the first “industry-wide standard”.
Plastic recycling expansion
August 13, 2010 at 2:36 pm
The North East of England’s largest independent waste management firm, Premier Waste, has announced a new hard plastics recycling service designed to combat the amount of plastic waste being sent to landfill sites in the UK.
With many summer products destined for landfill sites, Premier Waste’s timing should ensure that plastic recycling rates increase, with drop off points installed at nine of their Household Waste Recycling Centres in County Durham. The decision to offer local residents the opportunity to recycle all non-electrical hard plastic products is part of a wider initiative to increase recycling rates in County Durham and the UK.
The plastic collected will be used by manufacturers to make everyday items such as carrier bags, drain pipes, garden furniture, fleece jackets and sleeping bags, helping to reduce the estimated 3 million tonnes of plastic waste generated annually in the UK.
With plastic production currently using 8% of the world’s oil, it is clear that current practice is unsustainable, since oil is a non-renewable energy source that is rapidly being depleted. An increase in plastic recycling will make it easier for the UK to continue to enjoy many of its summer products made from plastic, with new items being manufactured from unwanted goods, and will also help the UK government to reach its current recycling targets.
If the scheme is successful at boosting recycling figures across County Durham, it is envisaged that the service will be expanded to include other parts of the North East of England as the UK continues its drive to increase recycling levels nationwide.
South Oxfordshire top of the league for recycling
August 5, 2010 at 1:37 pm
South Oxfordshire district council has claimed that last year it recycled or composted 73% of the household waste collected. This announcement comes a year after the introduction of an expanded collection scheme that has led to the inclusion of food waste composting. If confirmed by the UK government, this figure would put the district top of the league for recycling rates in England.
Between June 2009 and early June 2010, South Oxfordshire District Council’s municipal services contractor, Verdant, was able to collect a total of 18,531 tonnes of dry recycling, 6,115 tonnes of food waste, and 7,434 tonnes of garden waste. When added to the collections from the district’s recycling banks, this brought the area’s overall recycling and composting to 32,621 tonnes, compared to only 11,739 tonnes of waste sent to landfill sites in that same period.
This stunning achievement is reported to have saved around £350,000 of taxpayers’ money annually, whilst also generating up to £850,000 in recycling credits. This has been achieved despite an expansion of services provided by the council, demonstrating that expanding recycling services can help councils to cut costs as they look to reduce their expenditure and seek new revenue sources.
Despite the success of the scheme, the scenario could have looked very different. When the recycling service was changed last year, 1,000 homes were left without bins as the collections started. Shockingly, these teething problems were attributed to the fact that many of the individuals hired by contractors to issue the bins were unable to read addresses or use maps.
New recycling network for London announced
July 28, 2010 at 12:42 pm
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has announced that a new network is being launched to improve the recycling of household items in the nation’s capital. The aim of the new network is to drastically reduce the amount of useable items that are being thrown away and ending up in landfill sites.
The campaign was jointly launched with actress Joanna Lumley, and will receive £8 million from the London Waste and Recycling Board. The London Community Resource Network, which comprises 35 separate organisations, has been commissioned to run the programme, which will be called the London Reuse Network.
The London Assembly claims that about 65,000 tonnes of household waste are thrown away in London each year. The new network will aim to divert as much of this as possible into being reused. This will include items such as books, fridges, furniture and other reusable household items.
Boris Johnson said that it is “common sense” to encourage people to hand in items that they no longer need but which can still be used by others. He hopes that they will be able to “slash the mountain of waste” that is currently sent to landfill.
Matthew Thomson, the chief executive of the London Community Resource Network, said that most of its members in London were small and so could only operate on a local level. The new network will allow them to combine their forces to achieve more.
Residents will all have one single number to phone, and wherever they live one of the social enterprises will be able to turn up and collect the items. There will also be a web portal for the whole city. The aim is that by 2015 the network will divert over a million items from being sent to landfill every year. Hundreds of jobs are also expected to be created.
WRAP urges councils to work together to sell recyclables
July 23, 2010 at 3:46 pm
The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) have urged local councils to work together to ensure they are getting value from the material they collect.
WRAP has also begun to investigate how to increase recycling rates for aluminium can and foil by working with the Beverage Can Makers Europe to analyse waste composition. This will include analysing what is stopping people from deciding to recycle as well as investigating the social demographics of those who choose to, and choose not to recycle these items, with the eventual aim of providing councils with more opportunities to increase the revenue they are able to raise through recycling.
As well as attempting to increase recycling rates to help councils generate extra revenue, WRAP’s director for local government services, Phillip Ward, has branded councils as ‘useless’ at getting value from the material they currently collect. To improve this, he has suggested that councils, which are looking for ways to increase their income, should look at working collectively to sell their recyclables, as many currently do when buying services. Ward’s suggestion is based on the example of 10 Hertfordshire councils who have already successfully generated extra revenue by joining together to send newspaper to Shropshire-based Newport Paper.
The increase in profits generated through this partnership has encouraged the councils to deepen their relationship by signing two year contracts with two UK companies, with the aim of sending all their plastic, cans, glass and Tetra Pak cartons to the two recycling firms, with the expectation of raising £560,000 a year in extra income.
Should the Hertfordshire experiment continue to produce success it appears likely that councils across the UK may adopt their methods.
iPhone 3G most-recycled phone
July 16, 2010 at 4:34 pm
As with all things Apple, the iPhone 4, the latest version of the all-conquering smartphone, was released to a fanfare of hype and expectation last month. Desirable it may be, but priced at anywhere up to £600, it certainly doesn’t come cheap.
That leaves many fans desperate to get their hands on the new phone facing a conundrum: how to afford the latest must-have gadget?
The answer seems to be through recycling their old iPhones.
Sell My Mobile, the comparison site for recycling phones, has announced that the iPhone 3G was the most-recycled phone on the market during June 2010. This points to the fact that many fans of the iPhone are so desperate to get their hands on the latest incarnation of the model that they are ditching their old versions to raise a bit of extra cash to pay for it.
And it’s not an insignificant amount: the average amount that can be raised from trading in an old iPhone is £77.75, with highs of up to £170 reported. Sell My Mobile confirmed that the price will fluctuate depending on the buyer, so it is always best to look around for a good deal.
This is a great advertisement for the recycling of phones. Mobile phones consist of materials that mean they should not be thrown away to end up in landfill sites. The more people that start to recycle their mobile phones, the better it will be for the environment. And at the same time, as this proves, there are some real financial incentives for doing so.
Fortnightly collections to be binned
July 9, 2010 at 3:47 pm
The new coalition government would like to see local authorities making a return to weekly bin collections across the UK.
Communities secretary, Eric Pickles, wants to scrap fortnightly bin collections claiming that they are "unpopular and unhygienic". He has written to the Audit Commission asking it to reverse its policy.
Fortnightly bin collections were introduced so local councils could save money and to encourage households to recycle more waste, in order to reduce landfill.
But in a letter to the Commission Mr Pickles said he was concerned that some councils were being "marked down" for not adopting fortnightly collections.
He asked the independent watchdog to repeal guidance and "stop giving perverse incentives to local authorities to cut the frequency of rubbish collections."
However, the Commission says that it has "no power" to issue binding guidance to local authorities on rubbish collections and has "never issued" such guidance.
According to the Commission it has encouraged local authorities to review bin collections but said that it was up to locally elected members to decide their own policies including refuse collecting.
The new government wants to work with local councils to freeze council tax and help improve the frequency of refuse collecting.
There have been concerns about the health impact of fortnightly collections, with flies and maggots being attracted to rubbish that has been left to accumulate over a two week period.
But a recent study conducted by the government funded website www.wrap.org.uk looked at the health implications on fortnightly collections. It revealed that there was no evidence linking the frequency of waste collecting and any health impact on householders or refuse collectors.
Government review to boost recycling and maximise revenues
June 25, 2010 at 12:43 pm
The waste problem in England is going to be addressed by a new review that the government has launched. Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, announced the government’s decision to launch the review at the Futuresource conference in London.
The government plans to review every aspect of waste strategy in the UK. It has been described as a “no-holds-barred look at every aspect of waste policy”.
The review will cover many areas. Overall, the aim is to reduce the amount of waste produced in Britain, and it will look into different ways to accomplish this.
Ideas that will be examined include starting up the practice of collecting only standard waste one week and only recyclable waste the next week, fines for leaving the wrong kind of rubbish for collection, a ban on all food waste from landfill sites and the introduction of shopping vouchers for the households who recycle the most. This has already been introduced in a trial run and has so far proved to be successful.
Spelman also said that she wanted to see the construction of more locations where recyclable rubbish can be processed, rather than simply sending it all abroad.
Spelman was critical of Labour’s waste policies when in opposition, and now she is seeking to implement far tougher plans. One of the areas she highlighted was the packaging for children’s toys. She said that her children are “constantly bringing items home in thick packaging, polystyrene and cardboard, and it’s really all about making the product attractive to buy rather than packaging it safely”.
