GRJ0052

Written evidence from the Environmental Services Association (ESA)

The Environmental Services Association (ESA) is the trade association which represents the UK’s waste management and secondary resources industry. Our member companies are helping the UK move towards a more circular economy by collecting, sorting, and treating waste to recover materials and energy, while protecting the environment and human health. We are committed to delivering a circular economy in the UK, decarbonising the UK’s recycling and waste industry, and driving higher standards across our sector.

The recycling and waste management industry is leading the transformation of how the UK’s waste is managed. With a combined annual turnover of nearly £7.5 billion, our Members collect or process tens of millions of tonnes of waste materials every year and have helped England’s recycling rate quintuple in the last decade.

ESA welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry on Green Jobs.

Question 1. What estimates are there for the jobs required to meet the pathway to net zero emissions, by sector, and other environmental and biodiversity commitments?

1. The recycling and waste management sector will play an essential role in helping the government deliver on the ambitions of the Resources and Waste Strategy (2018), thus supporting the UK move towards a low-carbon circular economy. In driving the UK’s resource efficiency, our industry continues to help avoid and reduce emissions across the economy. As such, the London Waste and Recycling Board notes that “circular strategies could reduce global CO2 emissions by 40%”.

2. A significant increase in recycling and waste recovery infrastructure is needed to make the best use of all resources, by optimising the material recovery of recyclable and recoverable waste as well as the energy recovery of non-recyclable waste. These facilities would allow the UK to realise significant savings in resources and energy while avoiding CO2 emissions by decreasing the need for resource extraction and processing. In fact, the carbon footprint of recycled PET is 90% less than the virgin one, for textiles it is 98%, for steel up to 85%, aluminium 92%, paper 18%[1]. Where high-quality recycling is not possible, energy recovery facilities can recover low-carbon heat and electricity from non-recyclable waste that would otherwise be landfilled, and thereby saving 200kg of CO2 for each tonne diverted from landfill.

3. There are currently 5,610 enterprises operating in our sector, providing 123,000 jobs[2]. We estimate that the requirements of the Resources and Waste Strategy and the new facilities required to match the EU’s future recycling and recovery targets will create around 40,000 new permanent jobs in our sector, on top of over 30,000 temporary jobs during the construction phase.

4. A report by WRAP and the Green Alliance (2015)[3] also estimates that a circular economy could create up to 500,000 new UK jobs and cut unemployment across the country by 102,000.

Question 2. Does the UK workforce have the skills and capacity needed to deliver the green jobs required to meet our net zero target and other environmental ambitions (including in the 25-year environment plan)?

5. Our sector increasingly relies on a highly skilled workforce that is technically trained. As we build the new recycling and waste management facilities required to deliver a circular economy in the UK, the need for these skills is only going to expand. Temporary jobs will be created in the supply chains and in construction, and more permanent jobs in the operation of these infrastructures. There will always be a need for operative level employees, but increasingly processes will be automated and our current staff will need to be reskilled to operate these new technologies. It is therefore essential to promote the education in STEM[4] skills, and to ensure that retraining and reskilling programmes are widely available for our current workforce.

Question 3. What needs to be done to ensure that these skills and capacity are developed in time to meet our environmental targets?

6. We believe that significant targeted investments are needed in education and training to address immediate unemployment from Covid-19 and structural shifts from decarbonisation. More should also be done to promote circular economy career paths and highlight the essential role of the sector in tackling climate change. This will ensure that we attract the next generation of talent and that it is equipped with the right skills to meet the Government’s environmental objectives.

7. Our members already offer a diverse range of apprenticeships and support continuing education whilst in employment to help their workers develop new skills. We believe that reskilling and retraining programmes should be widely supported and focus on equipping the UK workforce with the right level of green skills to support the transition to a low-carbon circular economy. It is expected that most green sectors, including the circular economy sector, will increasingly require a highly skilled workforce, as automated processes will gradually replace low-skills jobs. These programmes should also be flexible enough to allow individuals from all backgrounds and ages to develop new skills over.

Question 4. What measures should the Government take to ensure that its proposals to meet environmental targets do not by default lead to jobs in affected industries being exported?

8. Waste is locally produced and should be treated by local recycling and waste management infrastructures providing green jobs all across the UK. Investment in domestic infrastructure across the waste hierarchy will play an important role in enabling the extraction of value from waste directly in the UK, therefore preventing these resources and jobs being exported to other countries.

9. The ESA welcomes the introduction of the plastic packaging tax as a clear incentive to stimulate demand for recycled content in plastic packaging. This will encourage investment in domestic reprocessing which will create green jobs in the UK. However, more should be done to stimulate domestic demand for all recycled materials.

Question 5. What risks are there to meeting the Government’s ambitions for green job creation in both the public and private sectors? What should the Government do to create the conditions to ensure its commitments are met by both sectors?

10. Our members stand ready to invest over £10 billion in new infrastructures in the next 10 years to boost the recycling and recovery of waste from home and businesses around the country and create green jobs in all parts of the UK, if supported by the right long-term policy framework.

11. The government can unlock investment in these facilities by creating a coherent, stable policy environment for resources and waste management. In particular, we would welcome longer term certainty and forward visibility on intentions for future divergence from the EU’s long-term Circular Economy Package. All policy changes in resources and waste management should be signalled well in advance to help underpin long term investment decisions from our sector in future infrastructure projects.

12. We would also welcome further actions from the UK government to clarify the timetable for delivery and accelerate implementation of its Resources and Waste Strategy published in 2018. This strategy introduces major new reforms that will have a profound impact on producers and the way things are made; how we collect materials when they are discarded; how we treat those materials and how waste services are funded. These measures are essential to move the UK towards a circular economy and towards net-zero, and will require major changes and investment from environmental services sector. The Environment Bill, which provides the much-needed new legislative framework to implement these new reforms, is essential to underpin this next phase of investment, and should be adopted by Parliament as soon as possible.

Question 6. Are the Government’s ambitions for green job creation in the public and private sectors sufficient for the scale of the challenges? What changes should be made?

13. The government should ensure that the right conditions are in place for investments in green industries, including the recycling and waste management sector. The creation of green jobs will follow these investments. For our sector, these conditions include longer term certainty on recycling and waste management policy and regulations, and ensuring that the Environment Agency has the necessary permitting capacity to deliver vital projects on time.

Question 7. How can the UK ensure jobs are created in areas most impacted by the transition to a low-carbon economy?

14. Targeted investments and retraining programs should ensure that workers in high-carbon sectors are able to find employment in green industries which will be in demand for the long-term. Future investments must be delivered strategically by stimulating demand for skills and decent work in high-demand low-carbon products, services and industries. Moreover, interventions to empower communities with resources and opportunities to buy more sustainable products will help an inclusive transition.

15. The recycling and waste industry creates jobs which are dispersed geographically, by occupation and by skill levels, and therefore will play a key role in supporting local economies, levelling up regions, and providing green jobs to these workers all around the UK.

Question 8. What additional interventions should be undertaken to aid in a ‘just transition’?

16. Not answered.

Question 9. What impact can green jobs have on the wider UK economy?

17. Investments and green jobs created in the recycling and waste management sector are key to improve resource productivity and help the UK achieve important environmental and economic gains.

18. Resource productivity helps make better use of our resources without undue degradation of the natural environment and can help reduce our ecological and carbon footprint. An analysis by Oakdene Hollins for Defra (2011)[5] estimates that improvements in energy and resource efficiency could reduce carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.

19. Moreover, improving resource productivity represents a significant economic opportunity for businesses by reducing costs and raising their productivity. The same report commissioned by Defra (2011) found that UK firms could realise resource efficiency savings of £55 billion per year, mainly through improvements in waste management practices.

Question 10. What contribution can green jobs make to the UK’s economic recovery from Covid-19?

20. The COVID-19 pandemic came with unprecedented challenges for a range of sectors which we all rely upon every day, including the recycling and waste management sector. Thanks to the hard work of tens of thousands of employees, our industry has shown resilience and has managed to keep essential public services operational throughout the crisis. Recycling and waste operative serving on the frontline of the coronavirus crisis have continued to safely collect, sort and process the waste generated by households and businesses, preventing it from becoming a health hazard at home or on the streets, and from polluting the wider environment.

21. The green jobs created in our sector will play an important role in supporting the UK’s economic recovery and in building resilience in the face of future crises. New recycling and waste management facilities would be widely dispersed around the country, creating green jobs in local economies in all parts of the UK. These would be well positioned to help those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Moreover, accelerating the move towards a circular economy will be essential to increase the UK’s resilience to the climate crisis, and to global supply chains crises as a more circular use of materials would reduce supply chain risks. The pandemic highlighted the need for more resilient supply chains that circular principles can provide solutions to. For example, promoting design for repairability, reusability, and recycling would allow the UK to use products and materials for longer, decreasing our reliance on import and availability of raw materials.

Question 11. How can the UK ensure high emissions are not locked-in when tackling unemployment?

22. Climate resilience as well as long-term climate and environment goals should be built into all future financial and policy decisions. New investments to support the economic recovery and jobs should be resilient to future climate risks and accelerate the shift towards a more resilient, low-carbon circular economy. These investments should thus prioritise low-carbon infrastructures and circular economy infrastructures.

23. Carbon taxes can also be an effective way to better align climate and environmental goals with economic considerations, and subsequently reduce emissions. For example, in our sector, market forces alone make landfill very cheap compared to more sustainable forms of waste management. Since 1996, landfills have been subject to a high implicit carbon taxation in the form of the landfill tax (almost £200/tCO2). This has helped significantly reduce the amount of waste being landfilled, as well as drive investment in energy recovery, energy from waste being currently the greenest solution for waste that is not technically and economically recyclable. In doing so, this tax has been an important driver in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from waste management[6] – in particular, methane emissions from landfill have decreased by 77% between 1996 and 2018[7]. 

January 2021