UK Recycling Market - Are We Over Reliant on Exports?

UK Recycling Market – An Export Time bomb?

During the last 10 years the UK has managed to make significant inroads to becoming a recycling conscious society. Whilst we have still a long way to go to truly understand and manage waste as a resource, huge investments have gone into the collection system with Local Authorities striving to meet their landfill diversion targets. Whilst Business continue to meet their Producer Responsibility Obligations under the Packaging Waste directive, investing £60 - £100 million per annum through the PRN (Packaging Waste Recovery Note) system.

So where does all this packaging waste / resource material go once it has been collected? And how sustainable in the long term are these markets?

The 2011 Packaging Recycling and Recovery Figures for Quarter 2 help highlight the increased reliance on meeting existing targets through exports of our Packaging Waste to the Far East (see table below).

Table 1 - Recovery and Recycling Carried Out In 2011 Quarter 2	Waste Accepted for UK Reprocessing	Waste Exported for Overseas Reprocessing	Total Waste Accepted or Exported
Paper/board	317,413	453,531	770,944
Paper Composting	962	0	962
Glass	369,458	72,249	441,707
Aluminium	11,454	6,781	18,235
Steel	51,506	56,498	108,003
Plastic	45,619	115,914	161,532
Wood Composting	141	0	141
Wood	161,718	0	161,718
TOTAL RECYCLING	958,271	704,973	1,663,242

Well it makes sense doesn’t it? We are consuming an increasing % of goods manufactured from Asia, which need to be packaged and our waste packaging provides a valuable raw material resource. It’s the circular economy!?

We now export more Paper & Cardboard for recycling to China than we recycle in the UK, and we export twice as much plastic.  Our exposure to the export market is enormous!

For nearly 10 years we have benefited from the growth and demand of the Asian economy; however this may be changing, and far quicker than we might have envisaged. China recently announced their latest 5 year plan ‘to build a circular economy via sustainable development, promising to promote energy and resource conservation and emissions reduction’. The ambitious plan includes a target to recycle 70% of their major waste products by 2015, putting in place a complete and advanced system to recycle their waste.

To put this into perspective China recycled 140 million tonnes of waste in 2009.

India also has a huge appetite for our waste resource, with a plastics sector employing 3 million people producing nearly 6 million tonnes of different polymers types. However like China India also plans to invest in its domestic recycling collections to sustain their demand.

So with the current economic climate in the UK and in light of the change and slower growth being experienced in Asia, is it time we have a re-think on the end markets we use or do we just need to get better at what we do and listen!?

We do need investment in the latest processing and sorting technology to deliver the highest quality secondary raw materials to international standards, which will in turn deliver optimal economic value.

 Perhaps we also need to invest in our own local end markets for recycling, to help manage any down turn in demand from the international markets.