- Posted by
- Marcus Gover, Director
Clear thinking in challenging times
20 January 2009
Although 2009 is already shaping up to be a challenging year for the UK and global economy, my view is that the financial benefits which are made possible by the efficient use of natural resources, reducing waste and recycling are now more important than ever.
There is no doubt the current economic downturn has had an impact on prices and demand. However, the prospects for recycling are far less gloomy than you would think from some of the press reports we have seen in the last few weeks. At WRAP we are responding to these current difficult market conditions by ensuring market players have regular high quality data about the state of the market. Hopefully this will help decision making and help to ensure there is a more informed debate about what’s happening in the market.
Although market prices for recovered materials are still fragile, the market data we have show that prices are stabilising – especially for higher quality materials. Even if materials are sold for recycling at lower prices, that is still a better deal for council tax payers than paying to send it to landfill.
An important aspect of the current situation is that it reminds us that effective and sustainable resource efficiency starts with waste prevention. Through this we use fewer resources, (and therefore save on costs of materials), we generate less waste to recycle or send to landfill and recovery costs are therefore lower.
The growth of recycling in the UK over the last decade makes a terrific success story. Almost 10m tonnes of municipal waste was recycled in the England last year and our latest intelligence indicates markets are still being found for the materials we put out for recycling,.
These materials continue to feed our newsprint mills, glass furnaces and plastic bottle reprocessing plants. Each year in the UK, we collect and recycle over a million tonnes of glass bottles per year and turn over a million tonnes of old newspapers back into newspapers. Our ability to reprocess recycled materials in the UK is growing fast with potential new high tech plants opening up that will produce plastic for more bottles and further newsprint mill capacity is in the pipeline.
So, the clear message to the millions of people who now see recycling as a way of life is that it is still worth recycling even in the current economic climate. It would be a tragedy if we lose consumer and industry confidence in recycling and throw away the enormous progress we have made.
Comments
John Costigane
January 26 2009
Alan Lewis
February 06 2009
Rob Whittle, NAIL2
April 18 2009