Plastic production is rising. With single use bans and consumer boycotts simultaneously spreading, have increased awareness and action made a dent in the industry’s activities? How can we further reduce its use and ensure replacements alternatives are indeed more sustainable? We speak to Zero Waste Europe to hear their opinion.

Reusable revolution

While affordable alternatives to plastic are vital, the priority must remain to reduce packaging overall. A long term solution is needed to determine an EU-wide target for a minimum share of reusable packaging, along with the promotion of refillable, reusable food containers. Tap water can be 900 times more eco friendly than bottled for example, as capitalised upon by Copenhagen’s multiple mapped drinking fountains.

Zero Waste Europe’s Larissa Copello cites deposit return (DRS) and reusable schemes already in place in Germany - Recup and Freiburg cup rolled out across the entire municipality to slash the 12 million empty cups wasted per year, as well as for takeaway food containers such as ReCircle Switzerland. “These are two models we like to promote. In these areas there is no single use plastic ban, only an obligation to reduce. We don’t want to see certain single use items being replaced by others. We want a system change. New alternative business models. Local reuse schemes are going to keep growing in cities.” As part of the UrbanWINS project, the city of Sabadell similarly piloted a rental scheme for tableware. The city purchased tableware for associations and civil society organisations to rent when organising events. This way, the organisations do not need to buy single use items and avoid having to invest themselves.

Alternative materials

Zero Waste Europe have advocated cardboard as well as mycelium, a mushroom-based material, for necessary packaging. Compostable options include mycofoam and mycoboard grown from agricultural waste. But what about bioplastics? Bio-based approaches are associated with complications and greenwashing, including competition of biobased feedstock with the food supply and difficulty of recycling. Composed from renewable feedstocks such as wood, straw, sugar, maize, cassava, algae or biowaste (‘biomass’ as an umbrella term), biobased and compostable materials present a “partial solution”. Used where necessary, bioplastics like PEF, a biopolymer made from plant-based sugars can have preferable properties to PET (polyester used in plastic bottles) and be recycled together with PET, depending on the recycling infrastructure. Some bioplastics can reportedly be broken down by soil particles or don’t use land or water at all. But most still need specific conditions and facilities and time to break down, further complicating recycling, and can leave behind toxic residue, for example oxo-degradable plastics.

That said, bioplastics may can be relevant for specific applications such as organic waste. A household food waste collection system using compostable bags was introduced in Milan, Italy at the same time as a plastic bag ban. This drastically decreased contamination of non-compostable materials, while organic collection rates tripled from 28 to 95 kg per person, creating more compost for farmers. Elsewhere in Italy, reusable nappies have replaced plastic ones in private and public nurseries in Bologna.

Alternatives to the alternatives

Economic incentives like taxing virgin plastic and plastic bag fees tackle the source of the problem, says Copello. The European Commission is creating guidance on EPR¹ (extended producer responsibility) to enable producers to produce more sustainably. “Producers should pay more if comprised of composite materials and/or added chemicals, less if fully recyclable, none if reusable.” she suggests.

Such economic instruments a) reward the uptake of recycled plastics and favour reuse and recycling over landfilling or incineration and b) step up and improve separation and collection of plastics waste. Voluntary commitments also encourage the uptake of recycled plastics, however work must be done to ensure demand meets supply, with an expected supply of over 10 million tonnes (the EC aims) exceeding 6 million tonnes in demand by 2021. Public procurement could greatly fuel this by purchasing recycled plastic goods, and encouraging supply chain/ manufacturers and the public via recycled content labels, while sharing best practises for recycling, the OECD states. Meanwhile, Britain plans to tax manufacturers producing less than 30% recycled plastic packaging. And Norway recently adopted a system in which single-use plastic bottles producers pay an “environmental levy” that declines as the return rate for their products rises. The bottles must be easily recyclable, clear or blue in colour, without toxic additives, and water-soluble labels. While well-designed deposit refund schemes (DRS) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) policies can recover the costs of waste management. However, voluntary agreements may be more effective than obligatory ecodesign regulation.

Is it enough?

Copello points out several European Commission directive objectives that have unfortunately been weakened, and deadlines postponed. For example, 90% separation of bottles was delayed from 2025 to 2029, enforcement of EPR regulation from 2021 to 2024 and labelling of environmental impact of (plastic filters in) tobacco products to 2023: “the single use plastic directive is a good first step but definitely not enough. Plastic pollution is a multi-dimensional problem. Starting with the most visible items is great… but the directive does not address the production, it addresses only some items.” “To ensure effective use of plastics, they need to be reusable. But instead of reducing, we need to stop producing…” Copello concludes.

1 Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) is a policy approach under which producers are given a significant responsibility – financial and/or physical – for the treatment or disposal of post-consumer products. Assigning such responsibility may provide incentives to prevent waste at the source, promote product design for the environment and support the achievement of public recycling and materials management goals. (OECD)

The textile industry is known for its devastating environmental and human rights impacts. According to recent estimates, the total greenhouse gas emissions from textiles production, are at 1.2 billion tonnes annually which are more than those of all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Textile production is steadily increasing – and with it the adverse effects it has on humans and nature.

So in the face of these facts - what needs to happen to make circular textiles chains a reality and what can public waste management companies do to contribute to a more circular textile industry?

One year ago, we talked to Michiel Westerhoff of Circulus-Berkel, the public waste management company that serves eight municipalities with around 440,000 inhabitants in the Dutch Province Gelderland, about their plans for a new textiles sorting centre. In July 2018 the centre starting operating and we are meeting Michiel once more to hear about how they got to where they are today. Read on to learn about the procurement process and how the centre tackles some of the major issues of the textile chain in a sustainable way.

Interview

You just opened a new textile sorting centre, which is operated by ReShare, tell us what is special about this centre.

We wanted to create an approach to used textile disposal that really challenged the business as usual – textile still lags behind in the whole recycling world. There is very little regulation about how to dispose of textiles and the whole situation is not very transparent. About 38% of waste textiles are currently collected in the Netherlands, which means first of all that 62% are going straight to incineration together with the regular household waste.

Although it is commonly assumed that used textiles are used for a charitable purpose, more often than not they are simply sold for the highest price to buyers around the globe [1]. And what happens once they are shipped is often unclear. They are sold on local markets or burnt or landfilled. And this is where we need to start – with the textile sorting centre we are taking a huge step towards more transparency. All reusable clothes that we sort are traceable. And with the idea in mind to keep them in the loop as locally as possible, they are either sold in Dutch second hand shops or within Europe.

Textiles that cannot be reused as clothing are recycled on the fibre level, where we separate the different fibres going into the product and sell them to manufacturers of recycled clothing or other materials that require fibre. About 25% of the collected textiles are still non-recyclable and will be incinerated. We are looking into the possibilities of new recycling techniques like chemical recycling to see how this number can be reduced.

But we aimed for more: we also created 25 full time equivalent jobs for people with difficulties integrating in the work force. This way we don’t only contribute to sustainability globally but also support our community here.

These are indeed some ambitious goals you achieved – tell us how you set up the tendering process to get to this point.

We were looking for a solution to textile sorting that did not exist before. Which is why we opted for an innovation procurement procedure. Our award criteria were based on four important pillars, on each of which we gave points.

Firstly, we asked bidders to show us how they plan to ensure full transparency along the recycling or reselling textile chain. Secondly, we required a strong vision on how recycling of non-reusable clothes was going to be organized. And thirdly, we asked for a risk analysis, since the quality and quantity of textile collection can always vary – something which the contractor needs to be fully aware of. And of course we judged the business case bidders were presenting.

Our contractors buy the textiles we collect in our eight municipalities and usually, contracts were awarded to those who offered the highest price for textiles. Unfortunately, this practices incentivizes unsustainable behaviour!

With this tender we wanted to send the right signal. We set a cap on how much we would ask the contractor to pay us for the textiles – just enough to cover our costs of collection. This price was clear from the start and therefore bidders did not compete on price. Any revenues the operation now has on top of a defined revenue is shared between our contractor and us. In this way we are both incentivized to create economic value within the framework of transparency, sustainability and social employment.

And how did you ensure that bidders came up with robust solutions that fulfilled these criteria?

Key to our success was definitely the intensive market engagement process that characterized the whole tender. Prior to publishing the call for tender, we consulted the market. We invited eight potential market parties and asked them about topics such as the necessary scale for a sorting operation, their sorting process, desired form of organization, possibilities for jobs for people with difficulties joining the workforce, location requirements, transparency and traceability, possible reaction on price and volume fluctuations and treatment of non-reusable textiles.

Based on this consultation we updated the business plan – asking ourselves, what can realistically be achieved? This resulted in a number of pre-conditions for the tender that required the support of our municipalities. On this basis we developed and published the tender. After a selection phase we then entered an intensive market dialogue phase with the selected parties. It was during this phase that we really fleshed out how to achieve everything we had set out to do.

What was the most important advantage of such an intensive process?

The goals we had set after the market consultation for transparency, recycling and creating job opportunities for socially disadvantaged citizens were quite challenging for the bidders. The intensive exchange helped them and us to come up with a good solution. We also involved the social institutions that were our contact for employing people with difficulties finding jobs. 

Which impact did your tender have on the market?

We got a lot of surprising and positive feedback. For one, as I said before, the textile sorting and recycling model is far more ambitious than the business as usual because it achieves higher and traceable rates of recycling and higher rates of reuse of clothes. On top of that, we managed to create jobs for socially disadvantaged groups. Our tender pushed the market in that direction. But even the losing parties thanked us in hindsight, because they learned a lot throughout the market dialogue. This really surprised us but also shows how much need there is to work together if we want to move toward more sustainable solutions in waste management.  

If you had to do it all over again – what are the most important lessons learned?

The most important aspect of this process was its cooperative nature – as purchasers we weren’t sitting across the table from our market parties and testing them. We wanted to create an atmosphere of collaboration, a shared mission that we work towards together. If you challenge the market in a fair way – innovative solutions will come up!

As you said, the textile sector is lagging behind in recycling. Which challenges do you still see ahead?

Most importantly, the recycling of textile materials that cannot be used as clothing anymore is still in its infancy. There are some small brands that use recycled fibre, but most of our fibre is currently down cycled rather than kept in the fibre loop. For example, fibres are used for insulation material instead of new clothes. Here we really need designers and producers of clothes to think with us and produce for recycling, which means using high quality fibres, and non-mixed materials. This allows us to produce high quality fibre which can be used for textile production. The market and the entire supply chain need to develop and adapt in this regard.  

What drives you to change the game in textile recycling?

We are a public service company. Our goals are set by our elected officials and luckily, politics in our region are quite ambitious. The region has the goal to become completely waste-free by 2030. Without this political commitment and broad societal support for our mission we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Thank you so much for speaking with us and good luck for your future ambitions!

In addition to intensifying the high quality recycling of textile and textile fibres, Circulus Berkel is currently also working on a plan to improve the recycling of diapers, which make up 8% of residual waste, improved plastic packaging recycling, extraction of protein from food waste and creating more jobs in the field of recycling, including repair, reuse, and remanufacturing of e-waste

[1] 71% of the collected textiles are exported.

Since Mayor of London Sadiq Khan's London Environment Strategy (LES) was published in draft for consultation this August, commentators have pointed to the strategy's broad reach and ambition - as well as its detailed analysis of the environmental challenges faced by the city of over 8 million people. The LES covers air quality, green infrastructure, climate change mitigation and adaptation, noise, the transition to a low-carbon circular economy, but most importantly for SectorWatch - waste.

While the Mayor's preface foregrounds the improvement of air quality, a recurring theme of the LES is the overall intention to ditch the 'linear approach' in favour of a circular economy in a number of areas. The waste section updates a 2011 strategy on municipal waste, and points out the looming problems: landfill will run out by 2026, only half of the 7 million tonnes of waste produced can be recycled, food waste is not being valorised. Of these 7 million tonnes the largest proportions are: 22% food and green garden waste; 60% common dry recyclables paper, card, plastics, glass and metals; 18% other materials including textiles, waste electricals (WEEE) wood, furniture and household cleaning chemicals.

Integrating waste into the Circular Economy

Another highlighted statistic is that London produces around 1.5 – 1.75m tonnes of food waste with a value of £2.55bn a year. One curiosity here is the expression of the amount of food waste, which is financial. Whether this portends a circular economy strategy which seeks to give organic waste a saleable value, or is merely a method of demonstrating scale is not clear. A question for procurers and others in the European municipal waste sector might be, "does the transition to a circular economy in waste necessarily mean attaching financial value for organic waste?"

" Single use packaging materials" are also identified as an area of focus, with UK national figures from WRAP extrapolated to demonstrate the pressure this puts on London's 33 municipal waste authorities.

Waste targets and challenges

The headline waste target of the LES is "by 2026 no biodegradable or recyclable waste will be sent to landfill and by 2030, 65 per cent of London’s municipal waste will be recycled". The LES points to a number of actions which will help achieve this, which angle the focus of the Strategy at this stage more towards the 33 municipal waste authorities than directly at the citizen, reflecting who is most likely to submit responses to the consultation.

The breadth of the LES and its reliance on the buy-in at local government level within the London region means that the results are really in the hands of the local authorities and agencies who will have to implement the strategy.

What will be interesting to observe as the consultation and political processes behind the LES continue is how high a priority waste will have in comparison with other aspects. This week the Mayor announced a new emissions charge for a much wider area than the original congestion charge, and issues of infrastructure (air, rail and underground) around London often dominate regional and national political agendas. Waste is one of seven areas identified, and up until now the main challenge has been achieving compliance with European level regulation. With Brexit looming, the impact of the European Waste Package and Circular Economy agenda might be felt less in the UK capital.

For further analysis, see the Zero Waste Europe website

The consultation is available here

Established in 2014, Circulus-Berkel is an association of 8 municipalities, which serves eight municipalities with around 440,000 inhabitants in the management of waste and resources and the management of public spaces.

Their mission is “A waste free society, a clean environment, a society concerned. In this way we add value to the region."

The main areas where the organisation works are the following:

Environment: reduce waste and improve the use of raw materials
Social activation: by increasing working opportunities
Improved citizen participation to achieve better results and provide a more satisfying service.

Main triggers to start the procurement and goals pursued

Textiles represent a huge environmental burden for society, derived mostly from the use of toxic and hazardous substances in the production process for textiles and the generation of greenhouse gas emissions derived from the production of textiles. Furthermore, clothes and textiles which still are in good condition are thrown away together with the residual waste and end up in landfills.
In the Netherlands only 30% of used textiles are separately collected, 30% end up in the residual waste and 30% can currently not be traced.

There are currently many ongoing initiatives that seek collecting used textiles and giving them a second life; initiatives that have been started by social companies and NGOs mostly at local level.
In our region, we introduced in 2016 the “BEST tas” (BEST-bag), a resistant bag made of recycled plastic that aims to collect items such as books, small electric appliances, toys and textiles, items that otherwise end up in the residual waste stream. The bags are picked up at home a number of days a year. In the past year, we managed to collect 60,000 BEST bags in our region, diverting over 420,000 kilos of used items from the landfills. 

The introduction of the BEST bag has resulted in an increased 8% in the separated collection of textiles and 11% for small and medium-sized electric and electronic appliances.
The total number of separated collected textiles has grown to 1900 tons in the regions.

Our current goals are:

To achieve better transparency in the reuse of textiles and the recycling chain. At the moment as it is the case of many other regions, a big part of the collected textiles are being exported to other countries, without sufficient transparency on the process and the consequences
Create (social) jobs within the region
Increase our re-use and recycling quotes and reduce the amount of residual waste.
For the non-reusable textiles, we are currently looking into new techniques for mechanical or chemical recycling.

Approach to the procurement process & time schedule

Currently we are in the middle of the preparation of an EU market dialogue for the creation of a textile sorting plant for about 1900 tons of textiles from our household, which will take place between the months of May and June.

Our aim is to start it on January 1st 2018.

We expect to create about 40 new jobs in our region with the new sorting plant.

Related information

Information to the BEST bag approach (in Dutch): http://www.waardemagazine.nl/#/artikel/best-tas-houdt-grondstoffen-uit-het-restafval

Circulus Berkel main website: https://www.circulus-berkel.nl/

Since the European Commission announced the withdrawal of the Waste Package in 2015, to be replaced with a more comprehensive strategy towards a Circular Economy, there has been a familiar level of debate and disagreement over its content and approach.

However, the acceptance in January by the European Parliament of challenging targets towards recyclable waste was heralded as a milestone on the path towards a more resource- and waste-efficient Circular Economy in the EU.

Revising Directives

The new "Waste Package" is, in legislative terms, designed to synchronise various Directives relating to waste, recycling and the related topics of packaging and disposal. The new targets relate primarily to the Waste Framework Directive, the Landfill Directive and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive.

The targets, when initially mooted in early 2016, were greeted by the waste sector with some concern. The complexity of introducing targets to an area of the economy characterised by rapid but uneven innovation and technological development meant that the Commission's approach had to be to impose relatively long-term targets: to prohibit landfill of recyclable waste by 2025 and to recycle 70% of municipal waste and 80% of packaging waste by 2030.

Challenges for cities

The achievement of these targets across the EU will be no mean feat. While many local and city-regional authorities who have invested in recycling innovation will have little difficulty reaching such targets, currently only 44% of municipal waste across the EU is recycled or composted.
The interpretation of the targets in member states might also present difficulty. The decision over which method should be used to calculate recycling and recovery rates was hotly contested in the drafting process throughout 2016, with industry and municipalities lobbying for the method laid out in the Waste Framework Directive, while environmentalists pushed for the more challenging WEEE Directive to be used. Looking at a process of implementation which extends over 8 years, the definition of "recycled" waste will come in for scrutiny in the application of these targets.

Focus of targets

The European Commission has been keen to demonstrate the potential value of waste targets to the private sector, which has greeted the European Parliament's vote with enthusiasm for the project job creation and market opportunities the targets create in various member states.
However there has been criticism of the targets from proponents of a Circular Economy for being uni-dimensional, and not challenging enough. The focus of the targets on waste output rather than on product manufacture, plastic-sourcing and reduction of e.g. packaging has led some actors in the waste sector to conclude that the Waste Package represents a non-binding, transitional legislative intervention. But proponents of a more product-oriented, differentiated policy had some success in influencing the outcomes - for example, a target of a 30% reduction in food waste is considered likely to have some impact on the food and drink sector. Overall there will be some concern that an opportunity had been missed, through a focus on residual waste, to regulate further on packaging and inefficient manufacture.

Sector Watch will follow developments on the targets through the EU Council and the formal decision-making process in the coming months.

More information on the vote in the European Parliament's Environment Committee on 24 January 2017 can be found at europarl.europa.eu/news