Climate Change Bill [HL]

Like my noble friend Lord Cathcart and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, I am not impressed by this rather odd little add-on to the Bill. My noble friend covered effectively the serious shortcomings in the legislation. It is odd that we are dealing with the matter in this way. One cannot be too hostile to pilot schemes of this kind, but one is entitled to ask why we have not been given a clearer picture of the way in which the Government intend to tackle the whole problem of waste. It is clear that it is of great significance as far as the Bill is concerned, because, as my noble friend indicated, waste is a substantial contributor to CO2 emissions. When we come to meet the targets and prepare the budgets and when the Secretary of State has to produce his great plans so that he can meet those targets, waste will have to be covered. It is therefore odd that it is not in the Bill. I suppose that the Minister will say, ““Well, it’s such a major set of policy matters that we will need to come back with separate legislation, and it will be part of a big Bill which at some time in the future we’ll produce””. It will be interesting if he says that, and we will want an indication of just when that legislation will come forward and its likely nature. As for the pilot schemes, we are talking about giving incentives to ratepayers to dispose of their waste in a particular way. However, I suspect that we really should be talking about incentives for industry, as my noble friend said, and for all others who produce waste, to get rid of it in the right way, as well as incentives for local authorities to handle it in the most efficient way. One of the difficulties that we face is the fact that waste legislation, notably the landfill directive, was devised before climate change became a great issue. Local authorities manage waste mainly on a weight basis. I am on the Science and Technology Committee, and we are undertaking an inquiry into waste. I do not propose to anticipate the findings of that committee as we are at an early stage in the collection of evidence, but we have already had powerful evidence from industry about what is going wrong and heard its concerns about the consequences. It points to the fact that, apart from anything else, there are about 400 different local authorities all pursuing different policies. That makes it difficult for industry to deal effectively and comprehensively with waste. If one local authority handles waste in one way and its next-door neighbour in another, it is difficult for industry, particularly the recycling industry, to work effectively. That is one problem. The Local Government Association briefing states: "““Local authorities know their local areas and are the best people to decide how to make the pilots work for the people they serve””." That may be so, but do they know how to deal with the needs of industry? My noble friend referred to the export of recyclable waste to other parts of the world, including China. This week, we were told by representatives of the IT industry that there was an acute shortage of recyclable plastic in this country for manufacture, including an acute shortage in the supply of plastic bottles. We were told that one of the reasons for that was the international recycling trade and the fact that the financial incentives encouraged disposal by export, probably to countries which recycled the material in a way that made a negative rather than positive contribution to climate change. We learnt that at present there are no adequate incentives to the recycling industry in this country to provide manufacturing industry with what it wants. We heard particularly important evidence from the aluminium industry. Aluminium is an amazing product: 75 per cent of all aluminium ever produced is still in use today. It is not only recyclable but can be recycled to infinity. You can go on recycling it again and again, which you cannot do with plastics or paper because the nature of the product changes in such a way that you do not get an adequate end-product. However, you can do that with aluminium. A difficulty that arises because local authority schemes are based on weight is that aluminium, which is a relatively light product, is simply not getting through the right recycling system. It is disposed of along with kitchen waste. We all know what we do with those foil containers in which we cook our suppers—particularly when our wives are away—having acquired them from the supermarket. There is no incentive to deliver them for recycling, and they go into the general waste collection. That is what happens to them. As a result, the industry is simply not getting the amount of material recycled that it would like to see. There are other problems. For example, you can recycle cans very easily, but there is a rather unfortunate tendency, particularly among the younger generation, to chuck them away and expect others to pick them up rather than to put them in places where they can be collected easily and recycled. We need incentives for them to do that. We were told that in spite of the industry’s efforts, over 90,000 tonnes of aluminium packaging in the UK, worth around £80 million, is still going to landfill. They say that that is largely because the packaging waste regulations and the landfill directive do not encourage local authorities to collect lightweight non-biodegradable packaging like aluminium. We were told that for local authorities the collection of lightweight aluminium packaging is not a priority because their targets are weight based with strong incentives to divert biodegradable waste. Aluminium is the only packaging material that has been almost totally dependent on recovering material from the domestic waste stream to achieve its targets. The glass industry gave us even greater cause for concern. Glass is a material that can be recycled again and again, but even those local authorities—this may seem absurd, but apparently it happens—that solemnly collect different coloured glass bottles in different containers because of the financial arrangements under which they work and the materials recycling facilities operate often commingle the collections again and throw them all in together. As a consequence glass reprocessors are increasingly receiving material of such poor quality that the only market for it is an aggregate for use in road building. The trouble is that the CO2 saving for aggregate use is negative, while if it can be used for recycling bottles and manufacturing it is substantially positive. In addition, material has been provided and the case has been made to bear out the fact that there is a substantial energy saving for every tonne of glass waste used in new manufacture because recycled glass melts at a lower temperature than virgin raw materials. If we are recycling glass we save a substantial amount in quarry. There are great savings to be made if we can get it right, but because so much of our legislation was devised before the advent of the climate change agenda that is not happening and it is having a serious impact on our glass industry, which is ceasing to be competitive —which should concern us—because our continental rivals are doing the job of recycling much better than we are in this country. If an industry is unable to meet its targets under the climate change agreements it loses an 80 per cent discount. That is worth £12 million per annum to the industry. The combination of the loss of that discount with the additional energy costs and the greater liability under the Emissions Trading Scheme is likely to see the UK glass industry becoming severely uncompetitive with the rest of the EU. Countries such as Holland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland already benefit from lower costs because their recycling and remelt performances are better than ours and they do not get penalised through having to pay a climate change levy. Surely that should be a concern for the Government. They have been told all that: strong representations have been made. I have been reading from a letter to Ministers. Why is something not being done as a matter of urgency? Why are we having a trivial scheme pilot for five local authorities to see whether they can get householders to create a better split up of their household rubbish? I do not understand, when there are substantial issues to be addressed. I say to the Government, if we are going to have provisions to deal with waste in the Bill let us have serious provisions that are going to make a difference, or specific information and undertakings about when they are going to come forward with effective legislation to change what is clearly a highly unsatisfactory situation.