We are reaching the end of the COP 27 conference, where the UN Climate Change Executive secretary in his opening speech stated “Every corner of human activity must align with our Paris commitment of pursuing efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees”.
Indeed, the contribution of the Circular Economy, recycling and waste management towards addressing climate change is often forgotten about alongside the more obvious contributions of energy usage and transport – even amongst those that block motorways and strap themselves to bridges.
The extraction and processing of natural resources causes half of global emissions, and the circular economy can certainly help to abate this by avoiding excessive consumption, waste and use of fossil fuels by leasing, reusing, repairing and recycling existing materials and products.
One study estimates that between 2020 and 2050, recycling can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 5.5 - 6.02 gigatons! Its normally helpful in these situations to have a visual aid to try and understand the amount this equates to, however, although I don’t know how this statistic may transpose into number of double decker buses or volume of CO2 that would fit into Wembley stadium, what I do know is that recycling makes a massive contribution to addressing climate change and that it needs more recognition on this stage.
Another recent study which aimed to understand whether people made the link between recycling and climate change concluded that “While participants were clear that climate change and environmental degradation had become an unavoidable concern, they almost universally struggled to fully describe any link to recycling….the lack of knowledge here was profound, and messaging focused on climate impact risks missing the mark. Concerns tended to be closer to home or directly connected to waste, with a focus on reducing landfill, rather than emissions”.
So although there has been significant progress over the years from the COP conferences and most notably the agreement to limit global temperatures, should our world leaders try to engage the circular economy and recycling more as a tool to reach this goal?
On a more local level, what could we as Local Authority officers do? Communicating messages to citizens and other stakeholders is never a ‘one size fits all’ approach, however, potentially, with the ever increasing interest and media focus on climate change, there is an opportunity to change the direction of communications to make more of a stronger link to an issue that more and more people are becoming increasingly concerned about.
Referring back to the opening speech of the COP 27 conference, our ‘corner of human activity’ within the waste sector needs to make itself more visible on the climate change agenda.
