Welsh Government - Beyond Recycling - Talking Rubbish

An attempt to highlight some of Welsh Government's quietly published plans

Have you noticed that your local authority doesn’t have a ‘tip’ anymore? It’s a recycling centre. It’s all part of the shift towards getting us to think of rubbish as recycling rather than landfill stuff.

Quite how we have arrived at the point of being a throwaway society to the extent that we have is naturally concerning. Successive governments have enabled this, big corporations have disproportionately contributed to this, yet all of a sudden it transpires that the Welsh Government have planned that in less than two years Wales will be sending ‘zero waste to landfill’. This comes from the ‘Beyond Recycling’ document published in March 2021.

It began with a consultation document in 2019 which stated that Wales wants to move towards a circular economy by 2050 to – somehow - ‘realise our economic potential’.

The consultation stated that the production of everyday products including cars, clothes and food, account for 45% of global carbon emissions and that our level of consumption uses far more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. The source for this ‘statistic’ is the Ellen McArthur Foundation which interestingly lists its strategic partners to include BlackRock, the Mayor of London, Visa and Coca Cola. Highly influential organisations that publicly endorse the circular economy include Google and Microsoft.

Then we see a further heading on the Ellen McArthur website with member organisations who have ‘great potential to influence the transition’ such as Amazon, GSK plc (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) and Johnson & Johnson.

Among the ‘headline actions’ of the consultation are that, ‘Wales wants to be the world leader in recycling – working with local government’. Welsh Government wants to ‘support all businesses in Wales to reduce their carbon footprint and become more resource efficient’.

It states that the plan is ‘key to the delivery of our obligations under the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals’. It is also ‘integrated with our key strategies and plans including the Low Carbon Delivery Plan and the Wales Transport Strategy’ (which I have written about previously here on Substack).

One circular economy business model (noted in the strategy) includes increasing hiring, lending and leasing – with echoes of ‘You will own nothing and be happy’ as the World Economic Forum has predicted.

I wrote in 2021 on the TCW Defending Freedom website that the Covid ‘pandemic’ enabled Welsh Government to implement targets already planned. Many of us have noted how the pandemic response fitted in very conveniently with the ‘climate emergency’, which is now the current thing to fear.

Indeed, Beyond Recycling includes the heading, ‘A Challenging Time – The Covid 19 Pandemic, Brexit and Climate Change’ which includes the following statement:

‘We already have a strong foundation for a circular economy here in Wales. This was demonstrated by how our communities responded to the pandemic, coming together to collaborate, act and share resources. We reconnected with our local areas, walking and appreciating our green spaces and nature as many of us worked from home. We shopped and used local businesses and sourced local products. We made more of the resources we had, and we shared and swapped locally the things we no longer needed. We used our vehicles a lot less.’

The pandemic appointment system at the local ‘recycling centre’ still remains in many Welsh local authority areas – with ID still being required - and will undoubtedly morph into a limited number of annual appointments per address. I have recently heard rumblings of one local authority in Wales during council meetings discussing charging for every black bag left out for collection, in addition to charging council tax. Appointments may also become limited through the closure of recycling centres. My local authority of Pembrokeshire recently sent out a consultation to residents in relation to ‘necessary’ cuts to services. Among the proposals was possible closure of one or more recycling centres in the county.

If charging for black bags is the way forward, Welsh Government had better review their fly tipping strategy which has not been updated since 2015.

For those with small businesses and charities in Wales, you will highly likely have missed the consultation by Welsh Government which opened on November 23^rd 2022 and closed 15^th February 2023. This proposed enforcement of business, public and third sector regulations in recycling. Not only does it appear from a cursory internet search that this was not widely publicised, it was also opened during the run up to the busiest period for business trading.

Additionally, Welsh Government have taken part in a UK wide consultation on the introduction of mandatory digital waste tracking. This will not affect domestic household waste but will apply to commercial businesses, waste site operators and local authorities. It is estimated that this could cost organisations ‘more than £100k’ to implement. Indirectly of course, this will cost consumers and taxpayers. Another consultation which went under the radar and only attracted fewer than 800 responses UK wide!

Looking after nature and the environment and helping to enable better prospects for future generations is of course essential, but why has this not been gaining traction over the course of many years? Why is this supposedly part of the ‘green recovery’ from Covid and also something that one has to go searching for online to find any real details of? According to the Circular Economy Wales – a Community Interest Company – the ‘march to a recycling economy for Wales originated in Europe following through on UN ambitions contained in the original Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.’