EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy

Maria Miller Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 General Committees

[The Chair]

We now have until 5.33, an hour after the start of the Minister’s statement, for questions to the Minister. I remind Members that they should be brief. It is open to a Member, subject to the Chair’s discretion, to ask related supplementary questions.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, and to have listened to the hon. Member for Aberavon and the Minister introduce the debate. I have two simple questions. The first involves the recycling industry in the UK. Many local authorities, such as mine in Hampshire and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South, are looking for more certainty about the future of recycling. Bearing in mind the problems local authorities have with getting contracts to recycle Tetra and other materials, what work are the Government doing to provide more certainty for the recycling industry, so that more products can be recycled?

[Rory Stewart]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her question. The first key element is that to create a real recycling economy, we need certainty, vision and clear targets. If Hampshire County Council or, for example, South Gloucestershire Council wants to make the requisite investments in recycling facilities or trucks, it would be really helpful if we moved from the more than 300 different systems we currently have throughout the country towards a more harmonised system. If a critical mass of councils were collecting Tetra and separating their waste into its component parts, it would be much easier for the environmental industry to make bigger long-term investments.

Secondly, we need to ensure that Hampshire County Council works more closely with some of its neighbours. There are some fantastic examples in South Gloucestershire, South Oxfordshire and Surrey. I would like to see the development of clusters—perhaps a London cluster, perhaps one around Hampshire—that can think about what best practice is and how to get the economies of scale. That does not necessarily mean one company collecting all the waste across many counties, but it almost certainly does mean developing simple systems in which, in a highly mobile population with people moving from one local authority area to another, people at least know what to do, rather than having to re-learn the rules of the bespoke system in every area.

[Mrs Miller]

My second question is on energy recovery. In Hampshire, only 7% of waste is disposed of in landfill because there is extensive use of energy recovery. The by-product of energy recovery is incinerator bottom ash, which is currently not counted towards recycling targets in England, whereas it is in Wales and other parts of the EU. The proposals before us do not recommend a change to whether bottom ash is counted, although they do recommend a change for metal-related bottom ash. Does my hon. Friend the Minister agree that we have an opportunity to include bottom ash in our recycling targets, so that we are more likely to get the increased recycling rates that we need and, indeed, that I know the Minister wants?

[Rory Stewart]

There are two issues: a past one and a future one. Incinerator bottom ash was not included in recycling targets in the past because it is not, in the narrow sense of the word, recycling. Glass, for example, is taken and turned back into glass; with incinerator bottom ash, a product is destroyed and something else—generally a cinder block—is generated, and that is normally seen as recovery rather than recycling. However, as my hon. Friend pointed out, Wales, in a domestic context—it is not allowed to do this in an EU context— does count incinerator bottom ash as recycling, as does Germany.

There would be a good circular economy argument for why we might want to include incinerator bottom ash in recycling targets. If it is being reused, that is certainly a product going back into use. So to take up my right hon. Friend’s challenge, the Government undertake to look closely at the idea. Over the past few weeks we have asked officials to begin to examine it more closely, along with the potential for extracting precious metals from incinerator bottom ash. There is potential for fantastic trade between Britain and Holland, which might result in many hundreds of tonnes of precious metal being extracted. As my right hon. Friend pointed out, that could make a significant contribution to our recycling targets.

Finally, I pay tribute to Hampshire council, because 7% of waste going to landfill is a fantastic figure to have achieved. The EU has set a target of getting under 10% by 2030, so Hampshire’s achieving 7% is worthy of admiration throughout the country.