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Although jobs in the environment has raised its head as an issue over the years, there has been surprisingly little focus on attempts to develop integrated reporting structures which identify underlying trends in this important area. The sheer number of extant jobs (start with the payroll in the Environment Agency and cascade that through the public sector and waste companies) makes this a surprising conclusion. Such jobs are the tip of a much bigger potential iceberg.
As our production economy seeks to utilise physical resources more effectively, the composition, structure and qualities of employment in environmental businesses can all be expected to undergo substantive upheaval. Those shocks will permeate logistics, end-of-life process technologies, academia as well as the manufacturing product process itself. As a matter of urgency we need to define benchmarks for these changes, quantify current employment patterns and start considering where to draw definitional boundaries.
Biffa needed no prompting when this project was developed by the National Recycling Forum/Waste Watch as a legitimate area of study. The conclusions are far from definitive - all we are certain about are the uncertainties! It is to be hoped, however, that this work will trigger broader awareness of these issues in the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions and Department for Education and Employment so that politically acceptable criteria can be developed on a partnership basis with industry.
Peter Jones
Director, Development and External Relations, Biffa Waste Services Ltd
and Chair of the National Recycling Forum Advisory Group
Waste management has received much attention during the 1990s, mostly driven by EU and UK Government policy and resulting legislation and regulation. These mechanisms have helped focus minds on the costs of the impacts of waste production and management, the potential value of waste as a resource, and the economic benefits of waste minimisation activities.
Industry has moved swiftly to reduce expenditure relating to waste, the costs of which were made more transparent and expensive through the introduction of the landfill tax. Waste minimisation became more of a priority, and activities focused on processes further up the pipeline.
For the householder, this focus on waste management has been almost non-existent beyond the introduction of kerbside recycling schemes. For the householder, municipal waste management is the responsibility of the local authority and is paid for through council tax rates, so "ownership" of waste and the costs relating to waste management are less defined than for individual companies.
The Landfill Directive is the first piece of legislation to focus solely on municipal waste, and sets out targets for reducing biodegradable municipal waste going to landfill. In the UK, over 85 percent of our waste is landfilled so meeting the Directive's targets will require a substantial change to current management activities. This change in approach to waste management is part of a reappraisal of traditional management in the light of sustainable development and sustainable waste management. There is no set definition of what is sustainable waste management per se, since the relevant variables are too numerous to reduce to a standard equation. However, understanding of the social, economic and environmental impacts of waste management will need to progress if we are to move closer to sustainable management of our waste.
One area where these three tenets of sustainable development overlap is in employment in the recycling industry. The creation of new employment which collects, sorts and recycles, remanufactures or refurbishes materials and encourages the use of recycled, remanufactured or refurbished materials is a step towards a cyclic economy, away from our current linear structure.
Our ability to make this step change is hindered by lack of data and its fragmented state. This report aims to present a comprehensive view of employment in materials recycling - from collection to sorting to the first stage of reprocessing where the materials are prepared for reuse in other processes - and to identify areas where job creation may occur. In this way, the employment benefits of recycling can be incorporated into policy-making and decision-making processes relating to waste management and beyond to regeneration, market development of recycled products, and regional development. Since this is the first attempt at such comprehensive data collection in the UK, the report is likely to raise more questions than it answers, but in so doing, will help stimulate further debate and discussion that will assist the step change needed to make current waste management practices more sustainable.