Circular Economy Taskforce

26 September 2024

Lee Marshall, FCIWM Director of Innovation and Technical Services

September brings a renewed sense of purpose after the slight lull of August and summer holidays. This is helped of course by RWM and the start of a round of conferences and other events.

The CIWM stand at RWM was as busy as we have ever seen it and the policy team had the opportunity to chat to lots of CIWM members about what is currently going on, or not, in the resources and waste world.

One hot topic was the Defra call for applicants for a new circular economy taskforce it was setting up. This was in part a replacement of the Resources and Waste Strategy Stakeholder Group which has now been disbanded and had been set up to help Defra with engagement on the Collection and Packaging Reforms. CIWM had been a member of this group, along with a wide range of industry organisations.

The new circular economy taskforce is again going to be industry representatives who will advise and assist Defra as it produces a Circular Economy Strategy, aiming for some time in 2025. The strategy is designed to help achieve one of the five state Defra ambitions, “creating a roadmap to move Britain to a zero waste economy”.

This is a really encouraging move by Defra and chimes with the policy asks CIWM  issued during the election campaign of producing a Circular Economy Plan and a supporting Resources Resilience Strategy, along with a cross departmental taskforce. OK, the taskforce being formed is more like an industry advisory or engagement group rather than bringing together key government departments for a joined up approach to the circular economy, but it is definitely a really big step in the right direction.

You can see echoes of the Scheme administrator shadow board in the way they intend to form the taskforce, with a certain number of places allocated by sector type of organisation. It is intended to be up to 15 people split along the following lines:

Industry representatives and trade associations e.g. manufacturing, retail, waste etc (9)
NGO representatives (2)
Academics (2)
Local Government representatives (2)

It will also have an independent Chair and Deputy.

How those organisations that do not make the taskforce engage on the production of the strategy remains to be seen and there will need to be avenues for others to input otherwise there is a danger a lot of “noise” could be generated as organisations try to make their voices and views heard. Equally there is only so much engagement Defra can do and it could be said that they perhaps went too far the other way and over engaged in their work on certain aspects of EPR. It will also be interesting to see if Defra has had their trust in industry dented with the recent leaks from Scheme Administrator discussions to the Grocer magazine. These things damage us all and trust has to be repaid or Defra quite rightly, could take it away.

So we wait to see how the taskforce is constituted and the sorts of directions and advice that it starts to provide to Defra and from that how a circular economy strategy might start to shape up. The fact that there is the prospect of such a strategy in the coming months shows that we are part of a shift in policy thinking in relation to the resources and waste sector. Again this chimes with the CIWM policy asks and so we can perhaps have some renewed hope that we will see progress on existing plans such as consistent collections and packaging EPR, policies that are still needed, while we wait for the new strategy to be developed.

It is unfair to say the Resources and Waste Strategy was a false dawn, as some good stuff, such as the Joint Unit for Waste Crime , have come out of it and we are close on some others. But it has left the sector a bit bruised and cautious so the announcements so far from the new Government are encouraging and are perhaps renewing some of the optimism we all had back in December 2018 when the Resources and Waste Strategy was published.