International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

private sector operators incur costs when unplanned changes to services are
introduced and so even where the actors involved are willing participants in the
change, there may be reluctance to make the switch quite as quickly as might be
desired. Finally, we note that there appears to be no sanction proposed for
application to those City and County Managers who do not follow the Circular’s
recommendations, let alone to those private sector operators who might be reluctant
to change their collection service before they have to.
33.7 Environmental Benefits
The aim of the Circular is to ensure that biodegradable waste which might otherwise
be landfilled is dealt with through alternative means. In environmental terms, reports
elsewhere suggest that the net benefits of such an approach will depend considerably
on: 623
535
� The design of the collection system;
� The choice of treatment system for collected biowaste; and
� The charging system applied in the context of the collection system used.
The reason environmental benefits may not be secured by the policy relate to the way
in which the two principal fractions of the targeted organic waste – food waste and
garden waste – behave when they are targeted for collection. Studies in the UK and
elsewhere highlight the potential for considerable quantities of garden waste to be
collected where garden waste services are offered free of charge. One report refers to
this as the problem of a ‘latent garden waste fraction’, lending itself to the possibility
that collected organic waste increases significantly in tonnage terms.
Data in Figure 33-1 shows two years of total waste arisings tonnage data for a UK
authority where a free garden waste collection service was put in place. In our
experience, this is a typical outcome in temperate countries such as the UK and
Ireland. The difference between the two lines of data represents the quantity of
garden waste that was separately collected. The service was trialled for a limited
number of households in the first year before being provided to all households in the
second year. Several important characteristics of garden waste generation and the
impacts of collection services can be observed in the data:
• Firstly, the impact of providing a new and free collection service is seen to
increase total waste arisings; this can largely be attributed to a reduction in
home composting and a potential encouragement of harvesting a latent
garden waste fraction (i.e. the new outlet for garden waste brings
additional material into the waste management system that was either not
created or previously managed at source – material from hedge cutting for
instance);
623 Eunomia (2007) Managing Biowastes from Households in the UK: Applying Life-cycle Thinking in
the Framework of Cost-benefit Analysis, Banbury, Oxon: WRAP.
International Review of Waste Policy: Annexes