We’ve got a new government and a new spending regime in place, but what will that mean for efforts to improve sustainability and security in the food chain? In spite of the eye-watering scale of impending cuts in government funding, there are encouraging signs that the coalition aims to keep the environment firmly on the agenda.
For instance, one of the first announcements from the new administration was a major review of Britain’s strategy for waste. “That’s very welcome if it helps focus on what the priorities are,” says Andrew Kuyk, director of sustainability and competitiveness at the Food and Drink Federation (FDF). “If you’re looking to make improvements that don’t require a huge financial commitment, cutting waste will boost competitiveness.”
The coalition has also said it wants a “huge” increase in anaerobic digestion (AD), which turns organic waste into energy. This is another positive sign, although Kuyk points out that if we succeed in reducing the amount of waste generated in the first place, there will be less available to feed new AD plants.
“We need to be clear what our objectives are: to minimise waste in the first place and only where it does arise to use it for a secondary purpose or in energy generation.”
Where next for Food 2030?
Food 2030 was the previous Labour government’s long-term strategy document for food sustainability in the UK and overseas. Although the Conservative-Liberal coalition has made no explicit announcement about the future of Food 2030, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) says it is continuing to draw up the implementation plan for the strategy as originally intended – for now at least.
In addition, the DEFRA has largely spared the budget of its waste reduction quango, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), cutting it by a relatively modest 5% to just below £96M for the financial year. “WRAP will be able to achieve this manageable budget reduction without stopping any of its programmes, or making staff redundant,” says a WRAP spokeswoman.
What no one can yet predict is what will happen in the autumn, when the government announces the results of its comprehensive spending review. This is the moment when ministers across all departments will need to come up with some seriously bloody cuts to implement the 25% headline reductions in departmental budgets. “WRAP has not yet been given any indication of what its budget will be in the next financial year and beyond, but clearly we expect further reductions,” says the spokeswoman.
“FDF is not challenging the principle of spending cuts and we’re not in the business of defending quangos,” says Kuyk, “but WRAP is doing very useful work and we want to ensure that work continues – whoever is providing it.
"We’re on course to send zero food and packaging waste to landfill by 2015 and WRAP is a pivotal organisation in terms of helping to make that happen.”
But there is another issue worrying FDF. Will the physical infrastructure be out there to deal with waste effectively? Local government is responsible for organising waste collection and recycling, and hard-pressed councils are bracing themselves for a funding squeeze.
“For example, you’ve got to have a collection mechanism to get stuff from the factory to the composting or AD facility. We’re concerned that should be given sufficiently high priority. In a spending squeeze that will depend on the other pressures that local authorities face,” says Kuyk.
Research funding
The third main area where support might suffer is basic food research. “I’d prioritise research funding even above support for waste reduction,” warns Kuyk. “It’s a classic market failure argument. Government should step in because the benefits are going to be for society as a whole.
"There are commercial pressures to reduce waste, but if there’s no obvious payback for commercial funders it’s going to be very hard to justify [private sector] spending on research.”
According to the Cross Government Food Research and Innovation Strategy, the public sector has been investing more than £400M a year in food research and the private sector is unlikely to plug the gap. Just 0.24% of expenditure by food companies across the EU goes into research, and most of it is very near-market. “Some funding will come from industry, but we need a strong public science base,” says Kuyk.
We’ll have to wait for the autumn to see how departmental cuts filter down to funding organisations such as the research councils, but the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) told Food Manufacture that it will be up to the individual bodies to decide how to prioritise their reduced budgets.
The good news is that food companies are continuing to make sound progress for now. The FDF’s Five-fold Ambition was first published in 2007 and is up for review this summer. Discussions began in early July and are expected to continue into the autumn in the five key areas of carbon emissions, waste, packaging, transport and water consumption.
In the mean time, Kuyk is confident that the existing 20% target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have been achieved by the 2010 deadline and that the 2015 target of zero waste to landfill is comfortably in the industry’s sights.
Packaging reduction
On packaging, the companies that signed up to the first phase of the Courtauld Commitment have successfully halted the rise in their packaging waste, diverting enough waste from landfill to fill lorries stretching from Southampton to Newcastle, according to WRAP. The second phase of the Courtauld Commitment superseded phase one earlier this year.
The new agreement places more emphasis on carbon throughout the supply chain rather than simply reducing the weight of consumer packaging, although that remains a priority. There is also a greater focus on the drinks sector, which generates 2.5Mt of packaging a year.
For example, Britvic’s J20 bottles used to weigh 200g and now weigh 180g, while coke cans weigh 5% less today than they did a year ago. Meanwhile companies such as Innocent and the Cooperative are increasing the recycled content of all their drinks containers with support from WRAP. Progress is less obvious on the remaining two FDF ambitions of transport and water.
In transport, Kuyk is confident that there are successes out there, but says it’s hard to get figures because of commercial tensions between the food companies and their logistics contractors. “If the contractor says he’s saved a lot of money, the food company is going to want him to drop his prices, so there’s a lack of transparency.”
It also took time to establish a reliable baseline for water consumption, but Kuyk says that “we ought to be seeing better progress” when the next figures become available. “Of course, we will also be reliant on WRAP still having the capacity to collect the data,” he adds.
Data gathering is not only important for setting baselines and tracking progress however. It also helps define the resource and waste streams that are out there, supporting the creation of symbiotic relationships between different organisations. WRAP is currently carrying out national resource mapping exercises for fruit and vegetables, fish and meat, with the results expected by the end of the year. A further national mapping project is being set up for drinks and water.
On a more local level, the success of resource mapping can be seen in the results from a project in the West Midlands, which was carried out by the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP). NISP is administered by an independent company, although the programme is funded through WRAP.
The West Midlands project was supported by the local economic development agency and looked at the two industries of metals and food and drink, both of which have been identified as economic priorities for the region. When it came to the food companies, NISP found itself facing distinctly different challenges depending on whether the businesses it was looking at were large or small.
For small companies, the biggest obstacle is to make it worthwhile for someone to collect relatively small amounts of material. Resource mapping enabled NISP to identify local clusters of businesses where a “milk round” approach to collection might work.
At the other end of the scale, the project found that most large companies had already found very low-cost disposal routes for their waste, such as land spreading or animal feed. Once such arrangements are in place, it can be very hard to persuade companies to consider other options.
However, Ian Humphries, NISP’s regional director, says that these routes face growing restrictions that will make them unsustainable in the long run: “The time is right for larger players to engage more.”
In spite of the obstacles, the project successfully identified sufficient food waste to make it viable for animal rendering and waste disposal specialist John Pointon and Sons to invest £4m in a new 50,000t AD plant near Stoke on Trent. The plant is expected to go live next March.
“In the past we’ve been mainly reactive, but this shows what you can do if you’re proactive. We think there’s a lot of potential out there across the country, as demonstrated by our success in the West Midlands,” says Humphries.
KEY CONTACTS
- BIS 020 7215 5000
- DEFRA 08459 33 55 77
- NISP 0845 094 9501
- WRAP 0808 100 2040