The Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer for SUEZ recycling and recovery UK (SUEZ) is asking the Government to address a disconnect between the Post-16 Education and Skills white paper released recently and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s (DESNZ) Clean Energy Jobs Plan which it launched a few days later.
Dr Adam Read said, “The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper in the UK provides a great framework for putting industry in the driving seat. By empowering employers to lead Local Skills Improvement Plans, the policy enables the waste and recycling sector to finally define for itself the right technical, high-value skills needed for advanced material recovery — the ‘supply’ side of our green economy.
“This is a crucial foundation, enabling us to counter the green skills awareness gap we identified in our recent research by allowing us to design qualifications that attract the engineers, chemists, and AI specialists required to manage complex circular systems.
“However, our optimism is tempered by an absence of waste and recycling in the Clean Energy Jobs Plan which focuses on generating clean energy via wind and nuclear – no mention of energy recovery – and also overlooks the foundational link that the resources and waste sector represents in securing secondary raw materials—the lithium, copper, and rare earth elements—needed to manufacture those very technologies.”
Read concluded, “We cannot succeed in the clean energy mission if we do not secure the supply of the materials needed to build the infrastructure. The Clean Energy Jobs Plan effectively ignores the ‘circularity’ part of the green economy and the waste and recycling sector’s role as enablers for that circularity.”
