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Introduction Paper No 2Element 2: Establishing material recovery systems
Within the MRS, establishing material recovery systems involves selecting and providing appropriate infrastructure for managing the material resource streams. The Country Council and the City Councils of Portsmouth and Southampton are statutory Waste Disposal Authorities (WDAs) meaning they are responsible for the disposal of all household waste. In Hampshire the WDAs have joined with the District Councils, the Waste Collection Authorities (WCAs), in a partnership known as Project Integra (PI). As part of the delivery mechanism, the WDAs have entered into a long term contract with a private sector partner to provide and operate a network of processing infrastructure and the associated transport. The Commercial and industrial sector has also invested in infrastructure to increase recycling rates and diverted material from landfill. The availability of landfill within the County is severely limited and is considered a costly and unsustainable means of waste disposal. PI has a recycling target of 40% and believes that this can be considerably exceeded, including recovery as well as recycling, and is working towards reducing landfill to 15% or below.
Project Integra can boast the most complete Integrated Municipal Waste Management system in the UK. Facilities either already operational or under construction include:
From 2006, around 75% of Hampshire's waste will be diverted away from landfill to either recycling, composting or energy recovery. The countywide recycling/composting rate is currently 24%. Integra has used its power as a significant supplier of recycled material to the UK market to establish a number of long term contracts and working relationships with material reprocessors. The Commercial industrial sectors also operates a number of aggregates recycling / secondary mineral blending sites, some materials recycling facilities servicing shops and offices, transfer stations, and a special waste incinerator which recovers energy. This includes Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment - The European Union have agreed a new Directive that will make manufacturers, importers and retailers responsible for the collection, reuse, recycling and/or recovery of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The Directive sets targets that ramp up over time. The plan is to implement the Directive in the UK by September 2005. The HNRI Trust has secured funds for the provision of a pilot WEEE de-manufacturing facility. The project is currently being developed. A parallel Directive restricts the amount of hazardous substances in WEEE as from August 2004. As from July 2006, no new electrical products containing lead, mercury, cadmium, etc can be placed on the market. (ELV) is the End of Life Vehicle Directive. As with WEEE, it applies to ‘producers’ and requires users to return end of life vehicles into the system free of charge from January 2007. There are also targets relating to the recycling and recovery of the constituent parts of vehicles. The County Council is working with partners to deliver a pilot project that will address the abandoned vehicle problem and assist in establishing a new infrastructure to meet the ELV requirements. Public Service Agreement (PSA). - Hampshire County Council (HCC) and the Government entered into the Local Public Service Agreement setting 13 targets to further improving the services to the people in the County. One target looks into the diversion of household, commercial and industrial waste from landfill through development of natural resource management approach. This aims to deliver the PSA aim of diverting from landfill an additional 40,000 tonnes of waste per annum by 2004/05, through the HNRI . Opportunities for changing current working practices in order to optimise reuse and recycling of construction waste have been identified and we are currently reviewing existing specifications to establish potential for substitution of secondary and recycled materials. Partners in Innovation (PII). - The objectives of this project are to demonstrate, through an integrated research, development and demonstration programme, the maximum practical level of secondary/recycled aggregate use that can be achieved within a geographic area, initially through highway and construction related to HCC and its neighbours; and then cascading to the wider construction and building industry. Sustainable Construction Framework (SCF). - Work on a sustainable construction framework (SCF) is currently being undertaken by officers within HCC. It is intended that the SCF will be a set of guidelines and new working practices for HCC that will be incorporated into the current framework and processes through which all of the county councils construction projects currently flow. Commercial Waste Trials at HWRC’s - This demonstration project will investigate the appropriateness of use of the County’s infrastructure of household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) and waste transfer stations for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to dispose of their recyclable and residual waste on a chargeable basis. The project will ascertain whether the network is suitable. If we are to be successful in moving from waste to resource management we will have to stop looking at household and commercial waste separately. Establishing a commercial / industrial and construction / demolition waste strategy is a priority.
The MRS approach is to maximise the efficiency of recycling plants for a wide range of materials – including paper, card, plastics, glass, metal cans, bio waste, and building waste the origin of these materials is irrelevant. They can be treated in a similar manner whether the source of the material is from a house, an office, a factory, a shop, or a development site. Further processing facilities are needed to meet targets and deal with these waste streams. This requires major investment in new infrastructure. Maximising the quality and quantity of material resources through existing schemes is also required. For example the existing kerbside schemes only capture around 50% of all available recyclate in the domestic waste stream, and larege amounts of inert material are still landfilled. The potential for significant improvements in resource efficiency in all aspects of the PI partnership, and other collaborations need to be examined.
The Material Resources Strategy seeks to draw together the function of the WDAs’, through their partnership in PI and the Hampshire Natural Resource Initiative which is addressing the issues of commercial and other wastes as part of MRS element 1. These organisations need to work together to build a physical and organisational infrastructure capable of meeting the wider recycling needs. Another pre requisite of this is that the planning system is able to provide the necessary support to achieve this as part of MRS element 3. In reality, whilst we shall see fewer landfill sites as a result of this approach, there will be a need for many more processing plants, from the Materials Recovery Facilities (MRF) similar to that already operating at Portsmouth, to the reprocessing of construction and demolition material, electronic equipment de-manufacturing plants, composting sites, both open and enclosed, furniture recycling plants, glass reprocessing, and many others. Integra needs a common vision as a reference point. The management Board (which consists of one elected Councillor from each of the partners plus the MD of Hampshire Waste Services) has agreed that Integra should jointly develop a "2020 vision". The objectives and principles of this vision will compatible with the MRS proposals.
Equipment and approaches – there are 13 waste collecting authorities in the partnership with 13 different collection systems – there is scope to integrate aspects of policy and practice. Money - a limited amount of DEFRA challenge funding has been made available but this will not cover the significant infrastructure investment needed to effectively implement a MRS. Changing the focus to material streams - for example, treating household (municipal) waste as a separate stream to commercial waste is a lost opportunity for economies of scale and also means that Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) don’t have access to cost effective recycling services. Achieving quality and quantity in materials - the more complex the waste management stream for the householder the more difficult it is to achieve the objective of pulling out the maximum quality and quantity of household waste. Time - the infrastructure for PI has taken ten years to plan and construct. It is reasonable to think that the infrastructure required to deliver the MRS will take a similar timescale, so we must start now if we believe the MRS is the way forward for Hampshire, Portsmouth and Southampton.
Produce a set of common values and aspirations as the common reference point. This must go beyond current limitations to thinking and tensions between different elements of the waste management system. Break away from finding solutions for household waste in isolation to commercial and other material streams. Strengthen and further co-ordinate the collection, processing and marketing of materials.
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