More than 280 local authorities across the UK declared a climate emergency in 2019, with the most ambitious of these aiming for net-zero by 2025. To stand a chance of meeting this aggressive net-zero target, collaboration between councils and their suppliers will be imperative - with waste and recycling teams being a key driver behind the changes needed to impact not only councils’ approaches and policies, but ultimately helping to influence behaviour change among their residents and business operators.
At FCC Environment, we deliver innovative waste management solutions for around 60 local authorities across the UK. When news broke last year as to how many authorities had declared climate emergencies, we wanted to understand more about how many authorities had considered the role of waste and recycling in their plan to achieve net-zero. In Autumn 2019, we commissioned a piece of research among LARAC members to find out.
Of those respondents whose authority had declared a climate emergency, less than half said that their authority had put together a plan on how they were going to achieve net-zero in practice. There was, however, some encouragement from those who had already put a plan in place; with almost 90 percent of these respondents stating that waste and recycling was a high or medium priority.
In recent years, recycling has become an increasingly key factor in the fight against climate change. However, we know that the UK’s recycling rate continues to regress year on year. The latest Defra figures, released in late 2019, revealed that the recycling rate dropped by 0.5 percent in 2018 against 2017. In the age of Blue Planet, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion why is this the case? For those local authorities who are yet to put together your plan for net-zero, I would urge you to put waste and recycling services at the heart of it.
We are already looking at how we can best support our local authority clients achieve net-zero. This extends beyond direct recycling practices to other initiatives – reflecting current Government focus on the wider climate change agenda. In the coming months, as just one example, FCC Environment will be running a 45-week electric refuse collection vehicle trial across a mix of urban and rural areas where we operate collections contracts. The trial takes place in a context of increasing Government measures to encourage the uptake of low emission vehicles. With thousands of miles of collections contracts extending across the UK, the potential of this carbon-friendly change to our vehicle fleet could be seismic and will go some way to reduce the carbon emissions of our local authority partners striving for net-zero.
The LARAC findings demonstrated that 78 percent of our survey respondents believe the climate agenda will make citizens more active in recycling and in turn lead to a rise in recycling rate. It is important however, that we make recycling as simple for people as possible – something the Environment Bill and the Resources and Waste Strategy are looking to address. As an industry we can lead a horse to water, but we can’t always make it recycle.
The data discussed in this article was taken from a survey of LARAC members in Autumn of 2019.
The opinions of the blogger are not necessarily those of LARAC
