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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sustainable waste management requires the shift from a linear to a cyclic economy. One that better uses its resources by collecting, sorting and recycling, remanufactures and refurbishes materials, and uses recycled, remanufactured and refurbished materials. Employment in these activities is an area where the economic, social and environmental aspects of waste management overlap. Yet, little currently is known about employment in recycling, mostly because data collection is poor and patchy.

The 1999 Landfill Directive focuses solely on "biodegradable municipal waste", and this is the main driver for the development of the UK national waste strategy, to be published in 2000. The Directive will have a large impact upon traditional waste management practices in the UK, and will force many changes. This report focuses on employment in recycling of the materials found in the average kerbside recycling scheme:

• paper and card
• glass
• steel
• aluminium
• plastic

In order to assist future policy-making and decision-making that aims to achieve sustainable waste management, better information about employment and the potential for job creation needs to be researched and made available. This report aims to kick-start the debate, discussion, analysis and data collection needed to make current waste management practices more sustainable.

Current employment¹ in the collection, sorting and reprocessing of the above materials totals just under 17,000. The table below shows a breakdown of these jobs:

Table 1: Current jobs in collection, sorting and reprocessing of household recycling materials

This total does not include jobs in the community sector, for which a safe estimate is 500 full-time jobs. This brings the overall total to about 17,300, which is very close to the upper estimate made by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1993. According to the DTI, 10 percent to 20 percent of the 87,000 jobs - 8,700 to 17,400 - in waste management, at that time, were involved in recycling.

The Landfill Directive will have a major impact upon waste management in the UK, and figures reported to the European Commission will be used to assess whether targets are being met. Accepting this, this report bases projections on future job potential on figures presented in the UK Government's Limiting Landfill consultation document on implementing the Landfill Directive. The 1995 municipal waste arisings figure in the report is 29 million tonnes, with a 3% annual growth rate. A truer reflection of municipal waste arisings in England and Wales is nearer 22 million tonnes. Therefore, in order to reflect truer potential job creation figures, this lower number is used in the projections.

A number of issues needing further consideration accompany the projections in the report. Not least, job creation relates to a rough estimate in the number of positions that will be required to satisfy the increased recyclate tonnages. It is recognised that a certain amount of "job shift" or replacement will occur, most obviously from traditional waste management jobs in normal collection and landfill management to jobs in materials recovery facilities (MRFs) or material reprocessing.

A second consideration is that the relationship between increased recycling tonnages is not directly proportional to an increase in employment. Job creation is influenced by factors such as efficiency levels in current practices, and the types of changes made to accommodate the increased tonnages - to design of collection and sorting systems, the range of materials collected, who is undertaking the activity, etc.

Another consideration is that of technological advance. The data in this report represents a snapshot of employment, and the potential for future employment based on the composition of this snapshot. Technological advances in collection vehicles, MRF technology, reprocessing capital, as well as changes in design of products that end up in recycling schemes, will all influence the employee tonnage handling capacity. There is no definitive number that applies to all, the majority or even more than a handful of recycling schemes.

Not all of these considerations are inherent to recycling schemes. With research and better data collection, many of them can be tackled. However, it is worth cautioning against the expectation of precise and detailed information being made available in the future. More comprehensive data collected in the future may help separate recycling schemes into bands, according to some of the influencing factors such as population density and level or type of technology used. It would take longer than the time available to the UK in implementing the Landfill Directive, to achieve this level of detail, and one can question whether this is what is needed.

The following projections are based upon current policy targets, and aim to identify where job creation is likely to occur. It is worth noting that a number of elements have been omitted from this report - not least, composting, textiles recycling, and the multiplier effect of recycling on jobs in recycling support industries such as collection vehicle and machinery maintenance - which have job creation potential. Therefore the following scenarios are an underestimate of the true job creation potential.

Therefore, meeting the packaging waste recovery target by 2001 potentially could create 10,000 jobs.

Although the potential for this level of job creation exists, there are barriers which prevent development in these areas. Data collection and a lack of "joined up thinking" where waste management is concerned are two of the most problematic types of barriers.

Better data collection systems will help internalise important factors that are currently externalities, including the employment impacts of different waste management processes. For example, a study of the three cities of Baltimore, Washington DC and Richmond, an area similar to London, found that for every 100,000 tons of materials collected and sorted, 79 jobs were required, and processing this amount required another 162 jobs. These 241 jobs were ten times as high as other disposal alternatives.

"Joined-up" thinking is needed in waste management if the UK is to move away from the historical, linear approach of the production-use-disposal chain. Continuing with this approach threatens to stifle developments in new industries and new partnerships that will need to be created, encouraged and maintained if sustainable waste management is to be achieved.

Beyond the immediate benefit of job creation, recycling can also assist other areas such as regeneration, technological advance and regional development. It also plays a role in meeting other international environmental agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol. Recent research undertaken by the United States Environmental Protection Agency showed the following impact upon greenhouse gas emissions (in carbon equivalents) from different types of waste management. These were the results:

Metric tonnes of carbon per US ton of waste

Source: US Environmental Protection Agency

Opportunities from recycling exist at all levels. Through Best Value, local authorities are encouraged to develop new partnerships with other local authorities, thereby assisting regional development. At the regional level, the bodies created through the devolution process - the English RDAs, the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales - have yet to see the role of recycling in assisting local regeneration and regional development.

The following recommendations are made, as a result of research undertaken for this report, as a means of stimulating further debate and highlighting areas where advances can be made.

[¹ Data from 1997 is used to establish the current employment picture in recycling. It is the year for which most comprehensive data is available.]

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