Tuesday 3rd January 2012 - No Embargo

CRR welcomes progress towards outlawing bad practice in recyclate collection

In a new year’s announcement The Campaign for Real Recycling (CRR) welcomes 2012 as the year in which high quality recycling will be required by legislation. It fully supports the provisions of the revised Waste Framework Directive (rWFD) of the European Parliament and Council and remains committed to ensuring that the requirements of the rWFD are fully and properly transposed by each of the devolved administrations in the UK. It also welcomes the announcement by Janez Potocnik, European Commissioner for the Environment, which endorses the paper industry’s stance opposing co-mingled collections.

The Judicial Review of the transposition of Article 11 of the rWFD by the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 has been stayed subject to re-drafting by Defra and the Welsh Government. CRR will actively scrutinise this re-drafting and its relationship to guidance produced under Article 4 of the Directive to ensure that from 2015 recycling is carried out by means of the separate collection of materials in order to facilitate high quality recycling.

The Campaign for Real Recycling welcomes the endorsement of Janez Potocnik, European Commissioner for Environment, in the European Declaration on Paper Recycling. Mr Potocnik says: "The Declaration is fully in line with the European objective to build a ‘circular economy’ aiming at using waste as resource. I am therefore happy to support the approach taken by the sector and to wish a long and successful life to this Declaration!"

The declaration itself says: ‘[M]ulti-material collection schemes (‘co-mingled collection’) where all recyclable materials are collected in one stream must not spread further in Europe and must be phased out where it already exists. Co-mingled collection has proved to be much less efficient in terms of quality and cost of the complete paper recycling process compared to separate collection of paper and risks deviating paper to recovery options lower in the Waste Hierarchy. Countries where co-mingled collection is predominant today must make significant progress towards the targets on separate collection set out by the Waste Directive.’

Andy Moore, CRR coordinator, commented: “The Campaign welcomes this unambiguous support and endorsement for the end to co-mingled collections and calls on all key stakeholders in the UK recycling sector to embrace the opportunities provided by this clear policy signal from Europe. Separately collecting materials so that they may be recycled 'closed loop' or upcycled is a requirement of the rWFD and the Campaign will support the proper transposition of the rWFD in the four devolved administrations of the UK.”

Simon Weston of Smurfit Kappa Ltd added his endorsement to the commissioner’s announcement, saying that from the point of view of all the stakeholder reprocessors in the campaign the announcement was very timely in view of the current position regarding the Campaign in its Judicial Review of the transposition of the rWFD.

He added: “If there was ever any doubt as to what the EU rWFD meant by ‘separate’ collections of paper, glass, metals and plastics this announcement by the EU Environment Commissioner himself has removed it. This is great news for UK recycling and for the UK reprocessing industry across all materials. The resource recovery industry needs clarity so that future investment can be accurately and usefully targeted.”

Andy Moore
Campaign for Real Recycling
07767 206 001