Recycling Carbon Index

Transcription

1 Recycling Carbon Index England, Wales & Northern Ireland Local Authorities 014/15 Summer 016 Winter 015

2 What is it for? Key Findings About Eunomia Research & Consulting Eunomia provides environmental consultancy to waste collection and treatment companies, to investors and to local, central and European government. In all of our work we aim to help our clients understand how the environmental and cost performance of the services and products they provide can be improved. We have modelled the carbon and other environmental impacts of waste collection and treatment services for a large number of clients including: Greater London Assembly. Eunomia developed the Emissions Performance Standard for the GLA to monitor the environmental impact of London s waste management services; Defra. Eunomia carried out environmental modelling for Defra of the whole of the UK s waste management as part of the Strategic Environmental Assessment for the National Waste Plan; European Commission Directorate General of the Environment. We have prepared a model for the European Commission to analyse the environmental impacts of waste management across the whole of the European Union. Local Government. Eunomia has carried out waste collection and treatment process assessments for a large number of English and Welsh local authorities. Our intention in publishing this work free of charge is to help local authorities and their service providers to think about the environmental performance of the services they provide. An authority s recycling rate is an interesting and important metric, but there are other, even more valuable measures of a service s environmental performance including the carbon index presented in this report. Now in its fourth year, Eunomia s Local Authority Recycling Carbon Index gives councils an alternative and arguably better measure of the environmental performance of their waste and recycling services. With this indicator we show which local authorities recycling services deliver the greatest carbon benefits. The Index can be used alongside the recycling rate and other metrics to provide a fuller picture of the environmental performance of local authority waste management services. This and the previous years results are available through our interactive website where authorities can track and compare their performance at How is it Calculated? Local authority recycling performance data is taken from WasteDataFlow 1 and multiplied by the same carbon factors used by Zero Waste Scotland to produce the Scottish Carbon Metric. By this method we convert tonnage data for each recyclable material into carbon dioxide equivalents (CO eq.). This shows the total embodied carbon 3 in the material that authorities are successfully diverting from disposal to recycling. Those local authorities that collect more of the materials with a higher embodied carbon for recycling will show higher benefits. We have calculated the total carbon savings generated from all the recycling reported by each authority, encompassing their kerbside collections, HWRCs and bring sites. By dividing this figure by the population served, we show a carbon saving per person thus allowing an effective comparison between authorities. The formula for the Index is shown below: Total Carbon Savings (Kg CO eq.) Population served kg CO saved per person The higher the value, the higher carbon savings will be. Rating authorities based upon this measure demonstrates that having a high recycling rate is not necessarily equivalent to having high carbon savings. Small errors in data reporting might significantly affect the ranking of the authorities in the index tables so the results should be treated as approximate values. For this reason we have created four categories to better reflect the general performance of each authority. These categories are defined as follows: High Flyers the top 10% Good Performers the next 30%, Mid Performers the next 30%, and Low Performers the bottom 30% England s performance has remained largely unchanged, with only a 0.4% improvement in carbon savings compared with 013/14. This is also reflected in the small increase in recycling rate of 0.%, reaching 44.7% in 014/15. Wales progress has also stalled this year with an increase in carbon savings of only 0.6%. Conversely, its recycling rate has increased by 1.9% to 56.% this suggests there is a danger that the focus in Wales may be moving towards quantity rather than impact. It should also be recognized that due to the priorities of the Welsh National Assembly, Wales measures it recycling rates differently from England, which can make direct comparisons of recycling rates between countries problematic. The Carbon Index seeks to redress this balance by calculating the carbon impacts in the same way for all countries in order to create a level playing field. Once again Northern Ireland s performance has shown the largest increase in carbon savings with 4.5%, although this sits alongside a modest recycling rate increase of 0.8%; bringing its overall rate to 41.4%. Again, despite having a lower recycling rate Northern Ireland has overtaken England for the first time in the Carbon Index as shown in the country comparisons at the end of this report. kg Collected per Person 013/14 014/15 Change Garden and food waste % Waste food only % Garden waste only % Textiles % WEEE % Paper % Card % Glass % Plastic % Metal % Total % The table above shows the weight of the key materials collected per head of population across England, Wales and Northern Ireland in both 013/14 and 014/15. Overall captures of these recyclable materials increased by.4%. Paper continues to show a decline, in part reflecting the move towards electronic communication. Card continues to increase, driven by the move to renewable packaging and the growth in internet sales. Separately collected food waste shows the largest increase as more authorities roll out services and public acceptance begins to increase. Small increases in both plastic and metals demonstrates a slow but continued benefit from the focus on these high value (in carbon and monetary terms) materials We have used figures from both the 01 and 013 versions of the Scottish Carbon Metric where appropriate Embodied carbon is defined as the amount of carbon released from material extraction, transport, processing and manufacturing, and all related activities. Recycling Carbon Index 014/15 3 Cover Photo: By Adam Levin. Used under Cretive Commons Licence

3 The Carbon Index results for 014/15 are shown alongside the 013/14 figures for ease of comparison. The relative positions and groupings of councils within the Index are defined by the 014/15 data to reflect the latest position. Because we include material collected at HWRCs in addition to kerbside collections, we report performance for Waste Disposal Authority areas rather than for Waste Collection Authorities. This helps to ensure a fair comparison between two tier councils and Unitary Authorities. While the same method could be applied to Waste Collection Authorities, their performance would be lower due to HWRCs being operated only at the Waste Disposal Authority level. Good Performers High Flyers Cheshire West and Chester North Somerset Dorset Waste Partnership Buckinghamshire Surrey Somerset Devon Leicestershire Wokingham Oxfordshire Isle of Wight 9 91 Bexley 8 89 Suffolk North Yorkshire Gloucestershire Hampshire County Durham West Berkshire Central Bedfordshire South Gloucestershire East Sussex North Lincolnshire 80 8 Wiltshire 8 8 Northamptonshire 81 8 Norfolk 80 8 Worcestershire East Riding of Yorkshire Milton Keynes Cambridgeshire Essex Cheshire East Lincolnshire Shropshire Medway Bath and North East Somerset Torbay Lancashire West Sussex Kent Hertfordshire York Northumberland 7 75 Cornwall Kingston upon Thames Reading Bracknell Forest Herefordshire English Recycling Carbon Index Mid Performers Rutland Derbyshire Richmond upon Thames Warwickshire Staffordshire Nottinghamshire Telford and Wrekin Swindon Poole Borough 68 Bristol Cheltenham Wigan North Tyneside Merseyside Plymouth Kingston-upon-Hull Bournemouth Windsor and Maidenhead Hartlepool Warrington Cumbria South Tyneside Wakefield 6 63 Barnsley Middlesbrough Greater Manchester 6 Bromley Halton 6 61 Southend-on-Sea 6 Blackpool 58 Croydon 59 Gateshead Calderdale Bedford City of London Peterborough Doncaster 58 Merton Redcar and Cleveland Derby Southampton Units = kg CO eq. saved per person In 014/15, 47% of English authorities improved their Recycling Carbon Index performance, when compared to 013/14 down from 64% in the previous year. Of those with an improved performance, 38% improved by at least 3kg of CO eq. per person. This resulted in an increase of the overall carbon savings from recycling in England of 14,000 tonnes CO eq, maintaining the total carbon savings from council recycling at 3.5 million tonnes. Poor Performers Enfield Ealing Rotherham Blackburn with Darwen Hounslow 6 55 Solihull 57 5 Stoke-on-Trent 56 5 Luton 51 5 Wolverhampton Sutton 5 51 Sandwell Brighton and Hove Barnet Leeds Council Sheffield Haringey Waltham Forest 4 48 Darlington Camden Kirklees Portsmouth Walsall Greenwich Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hillingdon Thurrock Slough North East Lincolnshire Barking and Dagenham 47 4 Harrow 44 4 Dudley 35 4 Islington Sunderland Stockton-on-Tees 4 39 Havering Westminster Southwark Coventry Leicester Birmingham Brent Hackney Western Riverside Nottingham Redbridge 39 3 Newham , 100 times! Bradford 9 30 Lewisham 8 9 Statistical Changes of those that declined 46% Declined 38% declined by 14,000 giving a total of 3.5m tonnes 47% Improved equal to the CO emitted from the electricity to boil 4 7% Remain Unchanged improved by >3 kg CO >3 kg CO 38% This resulted in an of CO savings of those that improved improvement of tonnes from 013/14 70 billion cups of tea (That s almost 5 years worth of British tea drinking!) 5 4 Eunomia Research and Consulting 016 RIO Tower Hamlets ml of water boiled from 15 o C producing 13g CO per cup using Defra s 016 UK electricity factor of 0.41kg CO e/kwh. 5. UK Tea Association - Recycling Carbon Index 014/15 5

4 Results for England Using the ONS 001 Area Classification A number of geographic and social issues may influence the relative performance of local authorities. For this reason, we have also ranked English authorities according to their super group classification in the 001 National Statistics Area Classification. This allows authorities to compare their indicator score against others with similar geo-demographic characteristics, giving a fairer measure of their performance. Northern Ireland & Wales Recycling Carbon Index In these tables, Waste Disposal Authorities have been grouped by their relative performance against the Recycling Carbon Index. In both countries, the majority of authorities have improved their overall performance. This has resulted in total increases in carbon savings of 5,500 tonnes for Northern Ireland and 1,500 tonnes for Wales; a 4.5% and 0.6% increase respectively. Northern Ireland Authorities Index Wales Authorities Index Prospering UK Cheshire West and Chester North Somerset Buckinghamshire Surrey Somerset Leicestershire Wokingham Oxfordshire Bexley Suffolk Gloucestershire Hampshire West Berkshire Central Bedfordshire South Gloucestershire East Sussex Wiltshire Northamptonshire Norfolk Worcestershire East Riding of Yorkshire Milton Keynes Cambridgeshire Essex Cheshire East Lincolnshire Shropshire Medway Bath and North East Somerset Lancashire West Sussex Kent Hertfordshire York Northumberland Bracknell Forest Herefordshire Rutland Warwickshire Swindon Poole Borough Cheltenham Windsor and Maidenhead Warrington Bedford Peterborough Solihull Thurrock Havering Cities & Services London Centre Kingston upon Thames Reading Richmond upon Thames Bristol Plymouth Bournemouth Greater Manchester Bromley Southend-on-Sea Calderdale Derby Southampton Blackburn with Darwen Wolverhampton Sutton Sandwell Brighton and Hove Leeds Council Sheffield Kirklees Portsmouth Walsall Newcastle-upon-Tyne Hillingdon Barking and Dagenham Coventry Leicester Birmingham Nottingham Bradford City of London Haringey Camden Islington Westminster Southwark Brent Hackney Western Riverside Newham Lewisham Tower Hamlets Mining & Manufacturing Coast & Country London Suburbs County Durham North Lincolnshire Derbyshire Staffordshire Nottinghamshire Telford and Wrekin Wigan North Tyneside Merseyside Kingston-upon-Hull Hartlepool South Tyneside Wakefield Barnsley Middlesbrough Halton Gateshead Doncaster Redcar and Cleveland Rotherham Stoke-on-Trent Darlington North East Lincolnshire Dudley Sunderland Stockton-on-Tees Croydon Merton Enfield Ealing Hounslow Luton Barnet Waltham Forest Greenwich Slough Harrow Redbridge Dorset Waste Partnership Devon Isle of Wight North Yorkshire Torbay Cornwall Cumbria Blackpool Omagh Larne Dungannon & South Tyrone Belfast 8 83 North Down 76 8 Banbridge 74 8 Antrim Cookstown Magherafelt Newtownabbey Fermanagh Limavady Craigavon 6 65 Coleraine 63 Ards Armagh Ballymena Carrickfergus Newry & Mourne Derry Moyle Ballymoney Strabane Castlereagh Lisburn Down In Northern Ireland... 8% Remain Unchanged This resulted in 77% Improved 15% Declined 13,000 tonnes of CO savings, an improvement Ceredigion Powys Monmouthshire 9 97 Conwy Rhondda Cynon Taff Bridgend Isle of Anglesey Denbighshire Pembrokeshire Carmarthenshire Flintshire Newport City Wrexham Swansea Neath Port Talbot Gwynedd 8 83 Torfaen Merthyr Tydfil 7 80 Vale of Glamorgan Caerphilly Blaenau Gwent Cardiff In Wales... 14% Remain Unchanged This resulted in of 5,500 from 013/14 1,500 64% Improved 3% Declined 58,500 tonnes of CO savings, an improvement of from 013/14 6 Eunomia Research and Consulting Recycling Carbon Index 014/15 7

5 Metals account for only 5% of recycling by weight, but around a third in carbon terms. NEWS RECYCLING BY WEIGHT 1% 7% 6% 5% 0% 11% RECYCLING BY CARBON BENEFIT 3% The carbon benefit gained from recycling or reusing waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is notoriously difficult to quantify and we believe it may be underestimated within the Carbon Indexsee further discussion on the next page. To better reflect how important WEEE recycling will become as products and recycling processes improve, the carbon factor is increased within this graphic from 0.18kg COe per kg recycled to kg COe. Whilst organics make up 45% of all recycling collected they account for less than 5% in carbon terms see further discussion on the next page. 4% 30% 1% Textiles have by far the largest contribution to the Carbon Index relative to their weight with around 1% of the total carbon benefit. Food Waste Overall, councils collected 8% more food waste in 014/15 than in 013/14 despite only 37% of councils offering separate food collections. Amongst high flyers 81% collect food waste separately. Overall, a further 6% of councils collect food mixed with garden waste, which tends to produce lower yields. However, boosting yields is not the whole story. Around % of food waste is preventable, and so while much more food waste could be collected, councils also need to keep looking for opportunities to promote waste reduction. Organic waste accounts for 45% of the UK s municipal recycling, much of this being garden waste. However, this represents less than 5% of the carbon benefit achieved. Although, in carbon terms, separately collecting organic waste produces quite modest benefits, the better performers in the Carbon Index are collecting more. It appears that their overall collection services are efficient and well designed, and perhaps that the residents are more engaged with recycling. The main carbon benefit comes from the avoidance of creating harmful methane gas in landfill or the inefficiency of burning large amounts of moisture-rich biomass in incinerators. Separately Collected Food Waste kg/pp Merthyr Tydfil 46 Vale of Glamorgan 43 Denbighshire 41 Swansea 40 Pembrokeshire 39 Bridgend 39 Buckinghamshire 37 Dorset Waste Partnership 36 Rhondda Cynon Taff 35 Ceredigion 35 However, collecting food waste separately also has other knock on benefits, such as a reduction in contamination of other recyclable materials, and enabling residual waste container capacity to be constrained through less frequent collections, which helps to boost recycling. As 00 s 50% recycling target focuses minds, we re seeing a fresh focus on introducing and optimising separate collection of food waste. Data from the Carbon Index has been used to highlight the authorities that collect the most per person (see above). Eight of the top ten are Welsh, with Merthyr Tydfil topping the table at 46kg of food waste per person. This represents just under half of the average annual UK person s 109kg food waste over a kilo per day for a family of four! 5 Around % of this is thought to be preventable, which highlights the need for authorities to work with householders to reduce as well as collect food waste. Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Currently the Carbon Index is unable to fully account for the carbon benefits of recycled waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). The original work carried out by Zero Waste Scotland to create the Scottish Carbon Metric found little data that would allow accurate estimates to be made for this waste stream as a whole. It is surprisingly difficult to quantify the carbon benefit, as treatment practices vary greatly between authorities and a great deal of the benefit depends on the detail of the process required to recycle each item of WEEE. It is also inextricably linked to the how the products are designed, including whether they can be disassembled quickly and effectively. Almost 300,000 tonnes of WEEE was collected by local authorities in 014/15, mainly through HWRCs. Rutland collected the most at 15kg per person three times the average amount. Despite our conservative assessment of the contribution that WEEE makes to carbon savings, the authorities collecting the most were almost exclusively those that performed well in the Carbon Index, again suggesting that they have developed effective collection systems overall. Waste electrical and electronic equipment kg/pp Rutland 15 Flintshire 14 Larne 1 Wiltshire 11 Monmouthshire 10 North Down 10 Antrim 10 Devon 10 Pembrokeshire 10 West Sussex 10 WRAP estimated 6 that 3% of the household WEEE collected by local authorities could be reused; but rather than being tested and resold, much is instead crushed or dismantled to allow the valuable materials it contains to be recovered. Working alongside charities, other third party organisations and the electronics producers themselves to repair and reuse electrical items before selling them on could also offer councils a valuable revenue stream with an estimated net value of around 100 million across the UK. Local authorities collection infrastructure puts them in a unique position to facilitate a significant expansion of WEEE reuse. Reusing rather than recycling WEEE would also boost the carbon emissions avoided through WEEE collections Eunomia Research and Consulting Recycling Carbon Index 014/15 9

6 Tracking Progress The graph below shows the progress of each country in the Index for the four years it has been running by summing the carbon savings of each country and dividing that by their respective populations. The overall performance of England and Wales has remained largely constant since last year, whilst Northern Ireland has maintained its rate of improvement and has overtaken England. Wales still saves around 5% more carbon per person than England and Northern Ireland through recycling. There are no specific differences between the countries that demonstrate that the disparity is due to different types of materials being collected materials are collected in roughly the same proportions for all countries. Neither are the individual authorities in Wales collecting the highest amounts of the materials with the highest embodied carbon. What Wales appear to be doing however, is performing consistently well across the country; they have no poor performers. Obviously this is easier to achieve in a country with a high rural population, so Northern Ireland faces an interesting challenge in trying to reach Wales level within the next few years, especially given recent district boundary changes. Monetising Carbon Benefits If local authorities did not recycle, what would it cost to reduce 3.88 million tonnes of carbon emissions in other ways? kg CO Saved Per Person million to purchase wind electricity instead of gas /1 Wales 01/13 Once again the results for all authorities can be found on the Carbon Index mini-sitewww.eunomia.co.uk/carbonindex Authorities can be found either by selecting regions from the interactive map or by text search. Each authority has its own results page Bristol s is shown on the right as an example which displays in a graphical format how the authority has performed against the Index over time. It also has a unique feature which allows an authority to compare its performance with that of its geo-demographic peers, through the use of error bars for each year. In the example on the right, we see that Bristol was in the top third of the Cities and Services group in 011/1, and then moved to the top in 01/13. In 014/15, Bristol s performance is slightly lower, while its group has performed worse as a whole. As a result, it remains towards the top of its group. We hope the extra level of analysis beyond this report will help authorities gain further insight into their performance. kg carbon saved per person England Interactive Website 013/14 N. Ireland Recyling carbon index score 011/1 01/13 013/14 Recycling Carbon Index Score 014/15 About this graph: the rectangular range boxes surrounding each point on the graph indicate the maximum and minimum score for all Cities & Services authorities. Report Data 011/1 01/13 013/14 Recycling Carbon Index Rank Recycling Carbon Index Rating 111 Mid Performer Good Performer 69 8 Mid Performer 014/15 014/ Mid Performer 43 million to purchase carbon offsets to plant new trees 15 million to buy credits under the EU Emissons Trading Scheme 1. Gas = 80MWh, Wind = 100/MWh (DECC Electricity Generation Costs 013) Gas = 500kgCOe/MWh, Wind = 10kgCOe/MWh (POSTNOTE 383 June 011 Carbon Footprint of Electricity Generation ). Offsets are around 11 per tonne - ww.carbonfootprint.com/offset 3. DECC traded carbon price = 6 for The US EPA Social Cost of Carbon is $36 for Current EU ETS allowance price is 4.5Euro = 3.75 / tonne Different governments value climate change damage in different ways million 6 is the UK value million is the US value 5 But some experts believe this is a 6-fold underestimate million may be the true cost if we didn t recycle 10 Eunomia Research and Consulting 11 Recycling Carbon Index 014/15

7 Further Work Our intention in publishing this work free of charge is to help local authorities and their service providers to think about the environmental performance of the services they provide. This report presents a high-level view of the underlying analysis. More detailed outputs can be provided quickly and at low cost for an individual authority or for groups of authorities. Our modelling allows us to look at the environmental performance of current and possible future services for both collection and disposal authorities and to look at the environmental impacts of collection, treatment and disposal. Want to Know More? Eunomia Research & Consulting Ltd 37 Queen Square Bristol BS1 4QS simon.hann@eunomia.co.uk This material is copyrighted. You can copy it free of charge provided the material is accurate and not used in a misleading context. You must identify the source of the material and acknowledge our copyright.