Last week Go Real, or rather myself, travelled 314 miles north (and then back again) to the 2008 European City of Culture, Liverpool, where for the last 2 years hundreds of Council waste officers, recycling officers, waste managers, sustainable development officers, waste minimisation officers and just about any permutation of a council waste person have met to discuss strategic issues for the waste management industry….commonly referred to as the
LARAC Conference.
Guess what this years focus was firmly on? You guessed it, money…or rather the impending lack of and how Council’s could work smarter to achieve more from less. Given that Go Real have just produced and distributed our very first Local Authority brochure entitled, “Targeting Real Nappies – Cost effective solutions for Local Authorities” we felt this was an ideal opportunity to test the water and see if Real Nappies were still on the agenda and with the Waste Review responses now being analysed by DEFRA, also a great opportunity to hear what they had to say.
Over the 2 days there were a number of key presentations from LA’s on partnership working and cost effective communications, some good, some not so good, and to a certain extent I’m not sure we hadn’t heard much of it before, so the highlights for me were:
Gunnel Klingberg, Secretary General, Municipal Waste Europe – an interesting presentation from an EU perspective. This organisation is effectively the EU LARAC of LARAC’s and Gunnel discussed the waste hierarchy and the importance of upcoming changes in legislation. From a Go Real perspective, Gunnel was delighted to see the work we are all doing in the UK on Real Nappies and keen to discuss further how this could be shared across the EU. Go Real will be following this up in the New Year and will be contacting all our European partners that we have communicated with in the past. Needless to say, Diana left with a Go Real brochure in her hand!
Diana Linskey, Deputy Director in charge of Waste Strategy, DEFRA – this was the big one….the one I had travelled 300 miles to hear, and unfortunately, I was slightly disappointed. Perhaps naively I had hoped to learn more about initial findings from the review, but unsurprisingly I guess, Diana was limited in what she could say at this early stage. So what did I learn, well:
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average waste in UK has dropped to 281kg per person (so for a disposable nappy family that would equate to 30% of their total waste!!)
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behavioural change is still a priority? (surely that’s a green light for Real Nappies!)
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Business Waste is a priority – no surprise there, Commercial and Industrial waste far outstrips municipal waste and our pre-occupation with municipal waste has always seemed strange.
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Support for Recycle Now and Love Food Hate Waste will continue (stressing the importance of national government funded campaigns to increase participation, what about nappies?!)
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Role of govt. – only intervening where necessary (does that mean no more support for nappies or does it signal that where there is a market failure they will step in, we’d argue that there is a market failure because there isn’t a level playing field and parents do not get a real choice.
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Big Society – removing barriers to participation was mentioned, what bigger barrier could their be to a waste problem than the upfront costs of Real Nappies, our waste review response called for a national government backed loan scheme to combat this, supported by the Big Green Bank!
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Localism – reflecting local needs. The Real Nappy sector is defined by its support from local volunteers/agents/retailers and reflects the diversity of the communities it operates in. Granted we could do more to address disadvantaged participation, but many of our supporters work on the ground in their communities for example giving out old stock to needy families or working with credit unions or even providing interest free loans to drastically cut the up front cost.
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Deregulation – reducing the burden on business. Go Real called for financial incentives for Real Nappy businesses to level the playing field….will they see the opportunity to be creative?
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Waste hierarchy – it was clear that reuse was high up the agenda and that nappies therefore played their part, but no specific mention was made, but there again, no specific mention was made of any particular waste prevention option.
The review received 300 responses in total, which for me is disappointing given that 100 of those were from LA’s, 57 from business and 38 from trade associations, 16 from campaigns and 14 from charities/community sector.
Having said that, with a low response, perhaps the Real Nappy responses we are aware of will stand out well??
However, my final observation on the Waste Review is this, I managed to catch Diana in the lobby after her talk and asked her how they would weight the responses so the messages were not dominated by a specific sector. Diana stated that they were not using weightings and with specific reference to the community sector, she said we would be treated differently! You could take this two ways, they are going to really listen and react to our proposals or that they will be dismissed as irrelevant… with all the focus on the Big Society, we have to hope for the former. Needless to say, Diana left with a Go Real brochure in her hand!
Further presentations from
WRAP on Love Food Hate Waste stressed the need for consistent campaigns that reinforced positive messages (sounds familiar) and that Civil Society membership organisations had a greater role to play in partnering on such initiatives, particularly because they reached groups that other organisations simply could not reach. (reminds me of the Carlsberg ad!)
Julian Parfitt presented research on why cutting communications spending in the short term only leads to higher costs in the longer term as participation drops and it becomes more expensive to get the public back on side. Clear and consistent messaging is so important and that is why national campaigns such as Recycle Now have been so successful. Julian also discussed findings on the ‘green jobs revolution’ from the US in which recycling jobs often produced some of the highest net benefits to society. Finally he unequivocally stated that going back to weekly collections of refuse was not the way forward and recycling rates would suffer, fortnightly was clearly the best option for increasing recycling rates. This is an opportunity for the nappy sector and if your Local Authority has fortnightly collections we should be working in partnership with them as they are more likely to be interested in a Real Nappy scheme to avoid the public’s negativity around smells building up!
So, 700 miles later and back in Cornwall, was it worth the huge expense?….on balance yes. However, if this conference is to have a future, then it needs to embrace Social Enterprise and actively open its doors to a sector that can, in partnership, provide many solutions to under pressure LA budgets.
