The need to reduce the carbon impacts of waste (as well its other impacts) is drastic in these days of man-made climate change. Libby Peake discovers what different governments are doing about it

Carbon and climate change. The words have become irrevocably linked as we’ve learned that we must lower emissions to avoid catastrophic global warming. But transmuting words into action has proved rather difficult. Scientists are reporting unexpected, record rises in greenhouse gases (a six per cent jump in global emissions between 2009 and 2010); the UN climate talks again descended into a farce of ineptitude; and senior environmentalists including Jonathon Porritt and Caroline Lucas point out that the ‘greenest government ever’ ‘is on a path to becoming the most environmentally destructive government to hold power... since the environmental movement was born’.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with waste? Well, quite a bit potentially, as efficient management of resources and waste could have a drastic impact on worldwide emissions. Indeed, before the ill-fated 2009 UN conference in Copenhagen, a Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) report claimed the global recycling industry delivers annual CO2 reductions of 500 million tonnes. This was a conservative estimate, it said, equal to almost two per cent of global fossil fuel emissions, which resulted from reprocessing 600 million tonnes of commodities to deliver nearly half of the raw materials needed for global manufacturing.

These savings result predominantly from avoiding the extraction and processing of raw materials (recycling a tonne of aluminium, for instance, releases only five per cent as much carbon as refining the virgin stuff), but waste is still responsible for emissions. According to the coalition’s 2011 ‘Carbon Plan’, the industry generates around three per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions – 89 per cent of waste emissions come from landfills where biodegradable wastes give off powerful methane. Because we’ve become more of a ‘recycling society’, these emissions dropped by 70 per cent between 1990 and 2009, and more recycling (and, crucially, more prevention) would keep moving the resource industry as a whole into carbon positivity.

‘Carbon’ is mentioned 40 times in Defra’s recent waste review and an impressive 60 in the accompanying 20-page action plan, so the rhetoric (as always) seems to be there, but what about the action?

Well, the main concretely carbon-related action is the development of a ‘carbon metric’ to sit alongside existing weight-based reporting. A spokesperson for Defra told Resource: “The aim of the carbon metric is to raise awareness of this way of measuring the impact of the different waste management options, and to build confidence in the tools to do this. We believe a carbon metric can more accurately reflect the environmental impact of different waste management options, and of prioritising different materials, than simply the weight of material.”