The new school term has started and the summer is coming to an end, and that can only mean one thing…..its conference season!
Many of you may have visited us last week at the LARAC Lounge at RWM in Birmingham. It was a fantastic two days with hundreds of attendees, stands, presentations and demonstrations. The LARAC lounge was designed as a hub for innovation, networking, and strategic discussions, offering local authority waste and recycling officers a unique space to connect with industry leaders and it was wonderful to welcome so many of you in.
I took part in a panel debate on Day 1 of the event, addressing the challenges of delivering the Extended Producer Responsibility scheme, of which there are many. A couple of key challenges being the gathering of accurate data and the development of effectiveness metrics for Local Authority services.
Data gathering is key to the successful implementation of the scheme, from all stakeholders, who want to ensure that adequate and accurate information is provided to support and underline the payments into the system. However, we have to be realistic that there is no such thing as 100% accuracy, and to obtain this would probably take more resources and money than the payments itself!
There needs to be an understanding (from both producers and Local Authorities), that a compromise will be put in place whereby the data will certainly be robust but may always be subject to inaccuracies.
Effectiveness metrics are a further challenge, and LARAC is working very closely with DEFRA on members behalf to support the development of these. It’s a lot harder than it may first seem. Effectiveness will be based on performance, and it could be argued that one of the most obvious measures of performance is recycling rate. However, there are many reasons for the differences in recycling rate across the country – with ranges from the late teens to the early seventies – and many of these reasons relate to aspects that Local Authorities have little to no influence over.
Recycling rates within individual Local Authority areas can be directly correlated with a number of factors, including; housing type, demographics, levels of deprivation and also a large number of gardens, as in many cases, the garden waste fraction of a Local Authority’s recycling rate could be up to 50% of the total. It will be interesting going forwards to see how this is addressed by DEFRA.
Over the next few weeks, I am due to present at a few other conferences and webinars, leading up to the LARAC Conference on the 9th and 10th of October! As always, this has come around again very quickly, but I am really looking forward to it and hope to see many of you there.
