Security of Waste Materials – a geopolitical issue

GLOBAL -

The new catch-phrase Material Resource Security - the protection of national material resources, primary and secondary - is a term that has yet to make it to the political speech-writer’s computer, but believe me it will, and in the not too distant future.

China’s threat to cut off Japan’s rare earth supplies, during the recent dispute over who was fishing in whose part of the ocean, is just the tip of a very worrying but rapidly melting iceberg.

As the three largest economies in the world, USA, China and Japan rush to gain influence with the raw material rich countries in African and South America for exclusive export supply contracts for raw materials - timber, minerals and ore - the debates about Sustainable Packaging Waste and Extended Producer Responsibility are increasingly becoming more geopolitical in nature.

Waste is no longer just ‘waste’ in the strictest meaning of the word, but it has instead become a resource. Packaging waste in particular, is a valuable source of raw materials to be recycled – if not in a cradle-to-cradle package-to-package closed loop, then into an entirely different product altogether.

Globally, there are two clear collection and recovery systems developing which will impact on the future trends in packaging and many other industries, and while they do appear to have similarities, they are also differentiated both geographically and by approach.

The Asian model being adopted regionally by Japan, South Korea, China, and gaining ground in South East Asia, is based on the concept of the circular economy, in which the waste material from one production process (say discarded PET bottles) becomes the feedstock for another (say textile mills). This is now firmly embedded in legislation.

Japan passed its ‘circular economy’ concept into law in 2001 as the Sound Material Cycle Promotion Law (SMC Law).

A suite of subsidiary legislation supports the SMC Law: The Food Recycling Law requires that all food and beverage outlets, restaurants and bars separately separate their organic waste from other garbage; it is collected nightly and shipped to industrial composting plants where it is turned into fertiliser while the methane generated in the process is harvested. This, of course, created an environment where composting facilities had to be constructed nationwide for compliance with the law.

The PC Recycling Law obliges industry and consumers to return end-of-life computers to a consortium of manufacturers where they are de-constructed and precious metals such as gold, copper, lead and tin is recovered along with plastic casings to be returned in a closed loop for subsequent re-use.

The End of Life Vehicle Recycling Law requires all vehicles to be stripped-down, materials recovered and sent for recycling. The Construction Materials Recycling Law does the same for demolition sites.

According to Ms Artemis Hatzi-Hull, Policy Officer, DG Environment at the European Commission, policies for Construction Materials and End of Life Vehicles are currently being drawn up in Brussels that will require all materials to be recovered, though the method may not mirror the Japanese system.

Japan’s Containers & Packaging Recycling Law requires Japanese consumers to selectively sort household waste into around 12 separate waste streams and sent for recovery and reuse. Today more than 78% of all Japanese school uniforms are sourced from polyester recovered from PET bottles.

It is a Zero Waste / Zero Landfill policy being adopted regionally, primarily for the purpose of securing the source of reusable materials.

China’s Circular Economy Law, passed in 2008, has a similar objective; the reuse of materials, and in particular energy, to reduce reliance on imported raw materials. China’s 2008 ban on the import of Household Waste was a significant step towards driving the development of a national material security policy in an economy where it was cheaper to import scrap plastic and paper from Europe and USA than to develop domestic collection systems.

In Europe, the Packaging Waste Directive established a framework for collection and disposal of packaging waste, but did not set a universal, EU-wide, methodology as to how member states should apply the framework. It ruled that members should see that packaging waste was collected, set targets for collection and that ‘something was done about it’ but avoided the specifics.

The result of two conflicting EU buzzwords from the 1990’s ‘Harmonisation’ intended to standardise legislation across the EU, and “Subsidiarity” which allowed the reverse: member states being permitted to evolve their own solution as to what the ‘something’ that would be done would be.

As a result, the combination of the two 1990’s EU theories has resulted in a situation where there is ‘Disharmonisation’ as the systems evolved are as diverse as the 27 EU member states: Some countries, like Sweden and Finland, followed the German system and introduced a deposit system selected items with the consumer paying up-front deposits on PET bottles for example, a barcode printed on the label indicates that the deposit has been paid and a refund is given.

From the outset, three countries elected not to follow the German approach: Denmark already had an efficient disposal system based largely on incineration and a ban on non-incineratable packaging such as cans.

The UK took a different approach with a market based trading and credit system that focused on ensuring sufficient money was available to take care of waste recycling and meeting the EU targets.

The Netherlands, looking at efficiency and cost effectiveness of the system, opted for a different approach placing responsibility on the municipalities for the collection of waste but entered into a binding legal covenant with industry whereby it would contribute sufficient money to ensure that the waste collected would be recycled.

“The trend for the future is that more and more the economic benefits of recycling are taking over from the ecological benefits” said Ruud Sondag, CEO of the van Gansewinkel Group, a Dutch waste management company. “If we recycle more than 1 million tonnes of glass in Europe, we do that because our customer, the biggest glass producer in the world, Owens Illinois, likes that. This is because we produce their culets enabling them to use 90 percent culets and only ten percent sand and soda ash, which in turn reduces their temperature bill by 200 degrees, impacting on both their energy consumption and contribution to global warming.

“It also allows them to reduce their furnaces in length consequently their glass melting investment programme.” In the UK, glass is still used as construction materials for road building with no additional benefits to industry.

The trend in Europe, according to Sondag, is less of a focus on the recovery and recycling targets being set in Brussels, but more towards a practical view about what the materials being recovered are being used for. “The objective will be to stimulate the economy by replacing primary source materials with secondary materials for the production of new products, making the product better, making it easier to recover in whatever take back systems there are across Europe, and ultimately developing into a formal pan-European trading system in recovered and recycled materials.

This is where the disciplines of economy and ecology come together: when big global producers are thinking about scarcity of materials and how they can get them back into the system, wherever in the world they are produced and consumed.

This will require global sourcing systems for secondary material, ultimately creating demand and resulting in protection of these secondary resources by governments wishing to keep them within their own borders, or use them to trade with other countries or regions with similar levels of purity of waste stream.

Here is where the geopolitical dangers lie: both the Asian and European systems, though different in their allocation of producer responsibility and collection methods, are in essence similar in their perspective of packaging waste materials as valuable resources that can be reused or traded – North America has no such system, or indeed lifecycle thinking.

With the exception of a few US states such as California, Delaware and Maine, and in Canada where Ontario leads the field – there is no cohesive coordinated approach to recovering material resources; therefore the purity and integrity of what is collected for recycling is in question. With a North American preference for dumping all forms of waste - industrial and household - in landfill, methane capture remains the only by-product to be derived.

However, as both the EU and Asia erect tighter front-of-pipe measures designed to regulate the Components and chemicals contained in packaging materials, like the REACH measures brought in by Japan at the beginning of 2010, and by China last month (October), in the geopolitical context, the Circular Economy blocks of Japan, China and the EU will have the ability to trade secondary materials safe in the knowledge that they have been recovered with integrity through similar secure methods. This will not be true for North America, leading to the emergence of Non Tariff Barriers to Trade with the world’s largest economy outside the ever closing loop.

For more information on Asia’s packaging, environmental and waste management legislation, click here.