Landfill tax and the CRC will soon come knocking

Tim Smedley | 15 Mar 2010 | 10:42

Last November, just as winter was turning up late for its shift (blimey did it go on to make up for lost time), I attended Wrap’s annual conference. For the uninitiated, Wrap was, at the time, one of several government-funded bodies in the recycling and waste reduction field.

Dr Liz Goodwin, the chief executive, told the conference how the agenda has moved on in recent years. It used to be all about waste paper bins and food packaging. Now the focus is very much about the waste hierarchy. And while the domestic arena has been bombarded with educational campaigns, followed by kerb-side collection green bins, brown bins and everything in-between, the focus was now on businesses, she said. Then up stepped Marc Bolland, CEO of Morrisons. He regaled us with how his supermarket’s integrated supply chain reduces waste at every level; 72 per cent of any waste got recycled.

Cut to the present day, and it’s still very cold and wintery. But Marc Bolland is running M&S, and Wrap is soon to take control of all Defra-funded resource efficiency bodies. The worlds of business and waste reduction, it seems, move at an equally fast pace. And, as if to prove the point, a particularly harsh shock lurks around the corner.

1 April 2010 ushers in the following: first, the opening salvos of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). As reported by PM in December, the UK’s first domestic cap and trade scheme requires organisations with annual electricity bills of approximately £500,000 or above to measure and report their energy usage. It’s not voluntary, it’s a legal obligation. Vincent Neate, KPMG's UK head of sustainability, has recently warned that “many of the scheme's participants are not yet fully prepared for the CRC”. Some, he believes, are clinging on to the vain hope that the scheme will be cancelled at the last minute. It won’t.

Second, landfill tax will also be increased on 1 April – to £40 a tonne. As reported in PM last week, it will be going up every April from now until 2013, making it more and more cost-effective to reduce, reuse, and recycle, rather than throwing waste away.

The message from government, in case you haven’t got it already, is that business is not to be trusted to do the right thing. A green world is one where legislation rules. If you want to be wasteful, you’ll have to positively hold it as a business priority to do so. And, in more ways than one, pay the consequences.

Run a tight ship when it comes to training

Iain Mackinnon | 18 Mar 2010 | 09:07

I always grab the opportunity to look around someone else’s workplace, so when I was recently in Ayr, Scotland, to present the results of a feasibility study for a new ports apprenticeship I asked if I could join an early morning tour of the port offered to delegates.

I wasn’t disappointed. The port managers present were primarily interested in what cargoes the port shifted, the depth of the channel, the types of cranes they used and so on. And we were all fascinated to hear how well the port of Ayr has done out of this winter’s bad weather: as politicians scrambled to get more grit on the roads, it was working flat out importing salt from Spain. Every cloud has a silver lining.

But I was most interested in the people, of course, and the balance between capital investment and investment in people. Modern ports are high-tech businesses and Associated British Ports, owner of the port of Ayr, is clearly committed to serious capital investment. We were shown a portable crane, for example – well-adapted to the flexibility on which the port prides itself – which cost well over half a million pounds.

So the team comes second to capital investment? Not a bit of it. Think of it in historical terms. When dock work meant emptying a ship’s hold by hard manual labour, or with very basic tools, docksides were swarming with low-skilled workers who, in truth, weren’t much valued. Had they broken a shovel, beyond getting yelled at, the capital cost was manageable. Break a £600,000 crane, however, and the position is very different.

For me, the relationship between capital investment and investment in people is really clear. It’s not a case of either/or: one without the other is simply bonkers.