Paper coffee cups are not to be taxed in near future

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has confirmed that the UK government will not be imposing a coffee cup tax on throwaway paper cups handed out by coffee shops such as Starbucks and Costa.

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Defra, Rory Stewart, hinted at the possibility of the government introducing a tax on the throwaway coffee cups while speaking in the House of Commons. Mr Stewart said the tax would be a positive step considering how successful the 5p carrier bag charge has been across Britain.

 

According to recent figures, the people of UK use seven million paper cups per day; this equates to 2.5bn paper cups every year and only one in 400 of these are recycled. Big name coffee chains, including Costa, Starbucks, Pret, and Caffè Nero have been heavily criticised recently for deceiving customers about the cups that they use.

These nationwide coffee chains claim that their paper cups are environmentally friendly and recyclable. The protective sleeves which Café Nero and Pret put around their cups claim to be 100% recyclable or recycled, but campaigners say that this is misleading as customers could think it applies to the whole cup.

In the House of Commons Mr Stewart said: “Having tackled plastic bags, which I hope everybody in the house would agree the plastic bag tax has been a success, coffee cups seem to be a very good thing to look at next.”

However, just hours later a spokesperson for Defra said that there were no plans to introduce a coffee cup tax but admitted that “more needs to be done to recycle coffee cups”.

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Charities could suffer as the council considers scrapping the recycling scheme

North Yorkshire County Council has announced proposals to end its recycling reward scheme which could negatively impact organisations, including charities, which collect and sell on unwanted waste items.

The council is considering cutting the scheme as senior councillors argue that it is “not key” to reaching recycling targets and the monetary awards handed out by the council can no longer be justified, as budgetary consequences must be considered.

The council’s recycling scheme allows charities and organisations to collect waste goods, including paper, textiles, toys, etc, and sell them on to raise charitable funds. North Yorkshire County Council rewards the organisations with cash bonuses as they are helping the council reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.

According to figures released by North Yorkshire County Council, it has handed out more than £111,000 per year in recent years to charities and organisations as part of the recycling scheme, however, financial considerations “suggests that the scheme can no longer be protected”.

Senior councillors have produced a report which details the reasons for the proposal and why they support the closing of the scheme. The councillors who approve of the proposal have argued that charities and other organisations will continue to collect the saleable waste regardless of council rewards and therefore recycling rates will not be affected.

However, two charities from the area, Essential Needs in Harrogate and Whitby Area Development Trust, have already claimed that the end of the scheme would mean the end of their charitable efforts as they could not survive.

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Japanese scientists discover new PET eating bacteria

According to scientists, a new bacteria has emerged which has the ability to eat the troublesome PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastics that are plaguing the globe.

PET plastics present a particular problem to the world, as they are difficult to recycle. Figures shows that 56 million tonnes of PET plastic was produced in 2013 but only 2.2million of that was recycled, while the rest made its way to overcrowded landfill sites or the world’s oceans.

 

A team of Japanese scientists at Kyoto Institute of Technology have discovered a new bacteria which they say eats away at PET plastic using two enzymes. The researchers believe that the PET eating bacteria, which they named Ideonella sakaiensi, must have evolved over time as the man-made PET plastic was only invented in 1941.

According to the scientists, Ideonella sakaiensi uses two enzymes to break down the PET until it becomes two harmless substances, terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol, which the bacteria then feeds on.

Koehi Oda, one of the researchers who discovered the bacteria, said: “We have to improve the bacterium to make it more powerful, and genetic engineering might be applicable here.”

The original report, published in the journal Science, says that at present the newly discovered bacteria can eat away a finger-nail sized section of PET within six weeks. At that rate, Ideonella sakaiensi would not make much of a headway with the thousands of tonnes of plastic waste produced globally each year.

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Customers can exchange unwanted clothing for a 10% off voucher

The US jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co has launched its clothing recycling scheme in the UK and hopes to implement it throughout the rest of Europe by the end of 2017.

The denim brand launched its clothing recycling scheme in the US in early 2015 and its success has inspired the company to expands its initiative across the Atlantic.

Levi Strauss customers can take unwanted clothing and shoes to any of the chain’s nationwide shops and in return, they will receive a 10% off voucher to spend in store. Levi Strauss hopes that the initiative will inspire the people of Great Britain to recycle more clothing instead of shipping them off to landfill.

 

The vice president of sustainability at Levi Strauss, Michael Kobori, said that the firm is focusing upon “sustainability across all facets” of its business but also wants to encourage a “shift in consumer behaviour” which would see clothing and shoe recycling becoming “the norm”.

According to Levi Strauss, 350,000 tonnes of discarded clothing and footwear ends up in landfill every year. The US firm is not the only organisation who recognises that this is not sustainable.

Mr Kobori said: “As an industry leader, we consider all phases of our product lifecycle, including stages beyond our direct control like the product’s end point.”

The launch of the clothing recycling initiative in the UK and Europe will result in a closer partnership between Levi Strauss and I:Collect; a worldwide company which offers solutions for the reuse and recycling of unwanted textiles, clothing, footwear.

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Recycling rates could be affected by the new circular economy package

Representatives from Germany, Austria, Sweden and other EU member states have converged at a conference in London to discuss the effects that the new Circular Economy package could have upon the nations’ recycling rates.

The EU Commission’s Circular Economy package must first be passed as a law by the Council of the European Union before member states have to act upon its proposals, but if it was to get approval by the council, EU nations would have to change the way they “measure their progress towards the municipal waste recycling target”.

The current recycling rate is set at 50% by 2020 and EU members can calculate how much they are recycling by using either one of four EU Commission approved methodologies. At present, Germany and Austria are two of the top performing member states, recycling 64% and 57% respectively.

The Energy from Waste Conference took place in London on Wednesday, 24 February, and was attended by representatives from member states, including from top performing nations, who are concerned that the new regulations proposed in the Circular Economy package could negatively effect the recycling rates across the EU.

The commission proposal outlines plans to judge the recycling rate by “the weight of the municipal waste recycled shall be understood as the weight of the input waste entering the final recycling process” rather than the collection of waste meant for recycling.

Jose-Jorge Diaz del Castillo, legal officer for DG Environment for the EU Commission, said: “The Circular Economy package proposes that we are counting only input into the final recycling facility whereas [before] we didn’t know how much comes out as recyclables.”

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Quarry business owners fined for breaching their environmental permit

The owners of a quarry in Worcestershire and their company, Broadly and Parton Limited, have been fined almost £50,000 following a “particularly complex prosecution” by the Environment Agency.

The owners of Cinetic Quarry, situated in Wildmoor, appeared before HHJ Pearce Higgins QC in magistrates’ court, accused of breaching the terms of their environmental permit. The two businessman and a member of their staff all pleaded guilty to the environmental offences.

The prosecution follows a two-year investigation by the Environment Agency, which repeatedly issued Cinetic Quarry with regulation notices, all of which went unanswered and ignored.

The Environment Agency said that the quarry owners had been carrying out illegal waste disposal activity at their site, which was in breach of their environmental permit and, from which, they had gained financially for a number of years. According to the agency’s investigations, the owners had allowed the burial of industrial and municipal waste at the quarry.

The owners argued that the Environment Agency had exaggerated the extent of the financial gains which the company had made by breaching the terms of the permit. Judge Pearce Higgins QC accepted this explanation.

The three defendants must pay fines totalling £18,750 and costs of £30,250. Two other men were also successfully prosecuted by the agency for illegally dumping waste at the quarry site.

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said: “This site posed a risk to the environment and had the potential to harm human health because it did not have the correct infrastructure in place to support the waste being disposed of there.”

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ESA claims to have helped reduce the number of injuries within the waste and recycling sector

A new report published by the Environmental Services Association (ESA) claims that it has helped reduce the number of injuries sustained by workers in the waste and recycling industry by up to 78 per cent since 2004 when a report titled ‘Mapping Health and Safety Standards in the UK Waste Industry’ highlighted alarming fatality figures.

The 2004 report was produced by Bombel Limited and revealed that, in the year 2001/02, more than 4,000 injuries were sustained by workers within the waste and recycling industry. Even more alarming was a fatality rate of 10 in every 100,000 employees; which, at the time of the report, was ten times higher than the UK’s national average.

The new report, titled ‘Aiming for Zero Harm in the Waste & Recycling Industry’, discusses the results of the “concerted effort” which has been made since 2004 by the ESA, WISH (Waste Industry Safety & Health), and the waste management industry.

The statistics show that members of the ESA have reported an overall reduction of 78 per cent in the number of injuries sustained within the workplace since 2004. The waste management industry as a whole, has witnessed a 23.7 per cent decrease in workplace injuries within the last five years.

Despite these positive numbers, figures released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show that the waste management sector is still recording a higher than average number of accidents; with figures suggesting a rate four times higher than the national average.

ESA has said that with the changing face of the waste and recycling industry, particularly since the development of circular economy models, waste management workers are dealing with jobs that are “increasingly mechanised and more labour intensive”.

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Councillors decide to cancel operations at two Lancashire waste recycling plants

Lancashire Country Council has decided to stop operations at the two £2bn waste recycling plants at Farington and Thornton in a controversial move.

The decision was made by the executive scrutiny committee at a meeting in the County Hall in Preston on Friday, February 19. The two waste recycling plants, which cost the council £125m each to build, will run quiet after June this year, when over 250 employees will be made redundant.

The committee said that the food and organic waste, which is currently separated and treated at the two plants, will now be sent to landfill. In 2012, a report suggested that 70% of the waste that was sent to the Farington and Thornton recycling plants was relocated to landfill anyway.

Lancashire’s expensive recycling project has been enduringly problematic, with Michael Green, Leyland South West Conservative councillor, describing it as a “failure of catastrophic proportions”.

Due to unmanageable costs, in 2014 the council was forced to break their 25-year contract with the private waste company Global Renewables, which was a groundbreaking deal at the time of the initiating in 2007.

Councillors from the executive scrutiny committee have said that a redundancy programme is now being rolled out and that all, except around 16 employees, will be made redundant. Rather untactfully, Leader of the Council Jennifer Mein, said that the “low-skilled” plant workers are “part of the ongoing process is to upskill those people who will no longer have jobs with the facilities closing.”

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Drink manufacturers are against plans to introduce deposit-and-return system in Scotland

AG Barr, the producers of the iconic Scottish drink Irn Bru, has said that the decision to hand over cash for used bottles and cans in Scotland could result in a ‘crime spree’.

The introduction of a deposit-and-return system for bottles, cans and cartons in Scotland is paving the way to scavenging, looting and fraud, according to AG Barr.

During a recent waste management debate at the Scottish Parliament, it was revealed that MSPs are considering implementing such a system within Scotland. Similar schemes are already successful in many countries throughout the world, including Germany, Sweden, Norway, the US and Canada.

Consumers pay a deposit on a bottle/can at the time of purchase (25 cent in Germany, 1 Krona in Sweden, which is around 10p) and then return the bottle/can to get that money back using special machines which are installed in stores and supermarkets.

Those who doubt the effectiveness of the deposit-and-return scheme, have said that it could lead to the “cross-border trafficking” of recyclable materials and the scavenging of bins, which occurs in other countries which operate such systems, where many homeless and unemployed people collect empty bottles from public and private waste bins.

Dr Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland and a supporter of the proposal, commented: “Deposit return systems work well in many countries and are very popular with the public. They also help create local jobs, reduce climate change emissions and boost recycling.”

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Supermarket Sainsbury’s is to phase out “buy one get one free” offers

The British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has announced that it will begin phasing out “buy one get one free” offers in its stores in order to reduce overall prices for its customers and to help households reduce food waste.

Sainsbury’s have said that the BOGOF deals should be completely phased out of their supermarkets by August this year, but their customers will not lose out as overall prices will be lowered. From August, the supermarket will run only seasonal multi-buy deals on a select range of products at specific times of the year.

 

The decision comes as pressure increases on western supermarkets to take action against global food waste.

As Asda focuses on increasing the public’s desire for ‘wonky’ vegetables and fruit, the Tesco CEO is leading a global food waste campaign, named Champaign 13.2, along with 30 other representatives from businesses, organisations and governments across the world.

The Money Advice Service (MAS) said that special offers and product promotions offered in supermarkets often lead to consumers buying more than they had intended to and more than they needed. Research carried out by MAS suggest that customers spend £11 more than anticipated per each grocery shop.

Sainsbury’s food commercial director, Paul Mills-Hick, has said that the initiative comes as customers are changing the way that they shop for groceries. He said: Customer shopping habits have changed significantly in recent years, with people shopping more frequently – often seeking to buy what they need at that moment in time.”

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