ESA’s Vision 2040: circular economy target requires collaborative efforts

According to the report, resource-productivity will need to be doubled against the national baseline, eliminating all avoidable waste by 2040 – which is a decade ahead of government targets.

The ESA has said that if policy and regulation can be designed and applied correctly to create investable conditions, the association and its members will invest up to £15 bn in circular economy infrastructure over the next 10 years. This will in turn create 40,000 jobs in reuse, repair, reprocessing and production roles across the UK.

By 2040, the ESA expects the average recycling rate for municipal-like solid waste across the UK to be 75%, representing a 10 million tonne increase on current recycling volumes to 40 million tonnes a year.

For the remaining 25% of residual waste, the association has said that energy recovery equipped with carbon capture and storage will continue to play a vital role enhanced by pretreatment aided by AI and robotics to extract materials. Any outputs from within the sector should be used as a commodity, construction material or low-carbon fuel.

The objectives are presented within the report as five pieces of a puzzle, which are listed below:

• Reduce waste arisings – A circular economy can be achieved by minimising the extraction of raw materials by being efficient with their use. This will require fundamental changes to societal consumption patterns alongside significantly increasing the prevalence of reuse and repair.
• Maximise the recyclability of recoverability of waste that cannot be avoided – All materials placed on the market should have a circular economy solution. This will primarily be incentivised through evolutions to existing and emerging policy mechanisms, including Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). It will also be essential that markets, and corresponding demand, for secondary materials are incentivised and developed in tandem in order to close the loop.
• Increase participation across the value chain – The synchronisation of a circular economy will require the participation of everyone across the value chain. Increasing participation will necessitate consistent and comprehensive recycling services across the UK and communications campaigns to engage consumers and businesses to use them. Incentives will then be required to drive continued performance gains.
• Recycling and waste treatment processes – Limiting residues arising from the post-consumer journey of waste material will play a key role in reducing avoidable waste to zero. This requires a focus on measures to reduce process losses; minimise sorting inefficiencies; create and deliver standardised outputs from waste materials as valuable commodities and deploy technological innovations to support these goals.
• Prevent waste from leaving the closed loop – Prevent waste material from leaking out of the loop once it has been closed. This means eradicating waste crime and ensuring that any and all post-consumer material destined for export has already undergone domestic processing to achieve an end-of-waste specification.

“Although this position paper sets out the framework and policy mechanisms required to achieve a more circular economy by 2040, delivering the desired outcomes will require a significant and sustained level of political will, likely across multiple parliaments, after many years of slow progress,” said Michael Topham, ESA Chair. “The ESA continues to work closely with government and other stakeholders to ensure that the policy environment delivers the investment we stand ready to make, and we welcome the formation of the government’s Circular Economy Taskforce, which our members both participate on and contribute to.”

Topham concluded, “Our intention with this position document, which will be further refined and updated in future, is to inform the conversation, rather than present a detailed blueprint at this stage, as we piece together the UK’s circular economy puzzle.”