Bioeconomy: S&T Committee Report

Lord Young of Norwood Green Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the Science and Technology Committee, on introducing this fascinating debate in an area to which, I must confess, I have not paid a great deal of attention previously—that is, treating waste as a resource rather than as a problem to be dealt with. It has certainly focused my mind. The committee has done a valuable job.

The fourth paragraph of the Government’s response states:

“The Government supports frequent waste collection and the recycling rewards schemes which reward and recognise those who reduce, reuse and recycle their waste”.

I do not understand why we have to support frequent waste collections because the problem is not the waste collection but what you do with it. At home, because my council collects plastic, food, paper and everything else, I do not need waste collection particularly frequently. I have calculated that, by the time I have sorted everything out, I can fill a black plastic sack about once every three weeks. So it is not the frequency. Surely it is what councils do with it.

This brings me to another part of the Government’s response, which states:

“In developing a long-term plan for a high value waste-based bioeconomy, we recommend that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills examines the strategies used by other countries to extract maximum value”.

That is a sensible suggestion but should we not be looking at what is best practice in the UK—at local authorities’ best practices? Should we be giving them some sort of award? It also seems to me that it is not just local authorities. I would have thought that the LEPs or local employment partnerships—which the Government, after all, created—ought to be drawn into this equation, to look at how they can encourage the development of local industries which extract the maximum value from waste.

We can see that this is a complex problem. Once upon a time, not that long ago it seems, we thought that anaerobic digesters were great and were the answer to the problem. Now we find that they are beginning to create a problem. I even heard a debate on the radio recently where a farmer asked whether he could get a better price by putting milk into an anaerobic digester rather than selling it, because the price he was getting for milk was so low. It verged on discussing the ethics of producing milk only to feed it into an anaerobic digester. There is a complexity about how we deal with this, but the basic approach that the committee has taken is that there is a really valuable resource here that the Government ought to encourage. There are signs that the Government are encouraging it but it seems to me, when we look at this problem, that reducing the amount of food waste in itself is important.

Again, I cannot help reflecting that we seem to have lost the use of a common-sense approach to this. I have watched people look at something and say, “That is the sell-by date so you throw that away”, even though most of these products actually last well beyond the sell-by date. We have a very crude device that labels food products and encourages the totally unnecessary creation of food waste. We seem to have brought up a generation of people for whom that is the only means of checking. You cannot open it up, smell it or look to see whether it has any obvious signs of organic decay any more; the only thing you can look at is the use-by or sell-by date. Surely we ought to be doing something about that.

One thing that was touched on in this debate that I found interesting—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, who mentioned it—was that landfill sites themselves are capable of being mined and that a vast amount of chemicals could possibly be extracted. There are technologies around that could do that. We have touched on food waste and organic waste, but we know there are whole other areas of waste that are a huge problem. Electronic waste and the amount of used tyres in this country create huge problems, so there are other vast areas. To go back to the issue that the committee looked at, it seems to me that the Government surely ought to be encouraging the new European committee to publish a five-year strategy on food waste prevention, to address the issues raised throughout the House of Lords inquiry and, as I have said, to ensure that the best practice in individual member states and local authorities can be translated into action elsewhere.

Does the Minister agree with the Waste Minister that the Government should step back in areas where businesses are better placed to act and there is no clear market failure? I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, who reminded us how difficult it is to pick the winner, if you like. He talked about the need for sympathetic or smart regulation to encourage that, which was a valid point. There is also the question of ensuring that we have solid, reliable data. It seems to me that, in developing our policies, we need a holistic approach to this. We would then be able to see, for instance, that biomass and anaerobic digesters are not going to solve the problems; in fact, they could create problems. We now know that we are importing a huge amount of timber to feed biomass power stations. I have read the analysis and I am told that, even if you import the timber from American forests and so on, it is still a viable proposition. However, I am sceptical; that does not seem the way forward in the long term.

I think that there were two references to the fact that it is possible to extract valuable chemicals from timber. I read in the report about high technology, the catapult and the Technology Strategy Board, but are those enough to encourage the development of these industries?

I think that I have covered the area of food waste by households and encouraging retailers not only to use better labelling but to take a better, more scientific approach. There are more sophisticated ways of ensuring that the public at large are much better educated so that we can help them to prevent food waste.

What are the Government doing to support WRAP, the waste and resources organisation, and to encourage low-carbon initiatives by food chain suppliers and other businesses? We can see that there is enormous potential here but the real challenge is going to be in how we convert that potential. I referred to LEPs but surely universities, colleges and schools all have a responsibility to focus on this area. What are they doing in their own environs? Surely we should encourage the next generation to think about how we deal with waste and to ask what opportunities there are, first, to prevent it and, secondly, to use it as a possible resource. Surely there ought to be a local strategy to ensure that all the educational establishments, first, look at their own environmental footprint and, secondly, encourage the study of this area, as well as practical participation by their students and schoolchildren.

Once again, I thank the committee for its valuable contribution to this area. It has pointed out that we should see waste as an asset that can be developed if we get it right. Looking at the Library notes, there are many interesting areas. I was attracted to the idea of creating fuel from ground coffee beans. However, the challenge for us, as a country, is going to be in ensuring that we develop a programme that will enable us to achieve what the Science and Technology Committee wants—that is, waste stimulating a real bioeconomy. I look forward to the Minister’s response.