Headline
- The North East has the smallest ecological footprint of all the English regions
- The amount of waste produced by the region's households has increased much faster than the rest of the country since 2000/01
- The region's household recycling rate is the lowest outside London but has increased faster than other regions since 2000/01
Introduction
Global population growth and improving living standards are placing increasing demands on the Earth’s resources. Key materials that are essential for our ongoing prosperity are already becoming harder to access and market mechanisms will not necessarily deliver solutions in the timescales required to prevent the exhaustion of supplies. There are also limits to the ability of the receiving environment to absorb the impacts of our resource use.
If current living standards are to be maintained, society must manage resources more responsibly at all stages in the lifecycles of products and services, from extraction through to disposal. We need to waste less, re-use more, maximise the recovery of value from unavoidable waste and minimise the impacts of disposal.
Ecological footprint – the global context
The principle behind the Ecological Footprint (EF) is that nations, regions, communities and even individuals should have the means to assess whether their consumption of natural resources and the resulting waste and pollution can be sustained within global environmental limits. EFs measure how much productive land is needed to provide the energy, food and materials we use in our daily lives and how much land is required to absorb our waste. The consumption-based perspective of footprinting brings together the environmental impacts caused by individuals directly (for example, by burning fuel to cook or heat our homes) and those caused by industry and commerce to produce the goods and services that we consume - even if that consumption may be via the public sector on the individual’s behalf. On average in the UK, our impact is split 25% consumption of food and drink, 25-30% consumption related to buildings and appliances, 15-20% passenger transport and the rest from clothing, tourism and leisure.
Ecological footprint is measured in “global hectares”, and it has been calculated that there are roughly 1.8 global hectares of usable land available per person (Global Footprint Network, Ecological Footprint Atlas 2009). This is described as any person’s “ecological footprint fair share”. In 2006, the world average eco-footprint was estimated as 2.6 global hectares per person (Global Footprint Network, 2009), exceeding available capacity by 40%, and indicating that the world already has a significant “ecological deficit”.
Ecological footprint can be reduced by increasing the resource efficiency of production, diverting “waste” to re-use, recycling or energy provision, and reducing unnecessary consumption in the first place.
The above graph shows that, in the North East on average in 2006, we each required 4.30 global hectares to provide our food and fuel and absorb our waste. This is about 6% higher than in 1992 although the peak value of 4.67 occurred in 2002. North East has a lower per capita ecological footprint than any other English region but it is about two and a third times our global fair share (1.8), higher than the world average of 2.6, and much higher than the footprint, for example, of an average person living in China at only 1.8 global hectares (Global Footprint Network, 2009).
Water Supply
Water is society’s most basic need, essential to human health and wildlife. A total of 760 megalitres of water per day is supplied to consumers by two water companies in the North East – 97% by Northumbrian Water and 3% by the Hartlepool Water plc. Almost exactly half this total is provided to households (378 Ml/day, 2008/09). This equates to a per capita consumption of 146 litres/day which is slightly below the national average. However, both companies’ figures show that there is a distinct difference between the per capita consumption of unmetered householders (NW-150.5, HW-153) and those living in properties with a metered supply (NW-133, HW-142). The goal set by DEFRA is to reduce individual water use to 130 litres per person per day by 2030.
Overall, their Water Resource Management Plans indicate that both Northumbrian and Hartlepool Water enjoy surplus capacity and there are no plans increase supply. Northumbrian Water plans to increase the proportion of metered households from 20% to 68% and to reduce leakage per property (household and non-household) by 22%. Hartlepool Water plans an increase of metered households from 21% to 76% and a reduction in leakage per property of 7%.
Abstraction management
The Environment Agency assesses how much water is available for abstraction in order to determine when, and under what terms and conditions, abstraction licences (for the water companies and others) should be renewed. The water requirements of the environment, the reliability of rainfall and the quantity of water within the catchment already licensed for abstraction are all considered. Berwick is served by a separate groundwater supply zone from the rest of the region. An abstraction deficit is forecast for the Berwick zone in 2015 when a time-limited abstraction licence expires. Northumbrian Water plans to improve borehole infrastructure to increase the resilience of this supply zone.
Rivers and wetland sites at risk of being adversely affected by unsustainable water abstraction are identified and form part of the Environment Agency’s Restoring Sustainable Abstraction (RSA) programme. An RSA scheme aims to reverse the damage caused by unsustainable abstraction of both groundwater and surface water. Currently, two RSA sites have been identified within the North East – the River Till and the Coquet Estuary.
Water footprint
The Water Footprint measures all water used by us, including that used indirectly both in the UK and overseas to make the industrial and agricultural products we consume. It is part of our overall ecological footprint (see Ecological Footprint section above).
WWF has estimated the total water footprint of each person in the UK to be 4,645 litres per day - more than 30 times the direct household consumption. 62% of the footprint is water consumed outside the UK and 73% is from agricultural products, principally food and clothing fibres, such as cotton. As examples: it takes 15,500 litres of water to produce a kilogram of beef and 2,700 litres of water to produce a cotton shirt. (WWF, UK Water Footprint, 2008)
Waste Production
The chart below shows the amount of residual waste produced per household. This is the quantity of waste produced less any sent for re-use, recycling or composting. The chart shows that, in 2009,/10 North East households produced slightly more residual waste than the English average. This represents a reduction from the 2000/01 figure of 37%, slightly less than the reduction achieved over England as a whole of 40%.
Commercial and Industrial Waste
Commerce and industry (C&I) in the North East produce considerably more waste than households. A 2006 assessment (based on a 2002/03 survey updated using 2006 employment data) estimated that the North East's C&I produces about 2.4 million tonnes of waste which is over twice the total from households. This does not include waste from the Construction and Demolition sector which is a significant waste producer. A C&I survey, due to report at the end of 2010, will provide better estimates of the amount of waste produced by the various C&I sectors.
Waste management - Landfill and energy from waste
The Landfill Directive, introduced in 1999, led the UK Government to publish a strategy for managing waste in 2000, which was updated in 2007. The aim of the Strategy is to reduce waste by making products with fewer natural resources and to break the link between economic growth and waste growth. This requires that most products should be re-used or their materials recycled and energy should be recovered from other wastes where possible.
The biodegradable part of any waste sent to a landfill site generates methane (a potent greenhouse gas) while valuable energy is used in extracting and processing new raw materials to replace the other goods that have been thrown away. That is why landfill should be seen as the last resort for a residual of waste material only.
The updated 2007 UK Waste Strategy sets a number of targets including:
- To recycle or compost 40% of household waste by 2010, 45% by 2015 and 50% by 2020
- To recover value from 53% of municipal waste by 2010, 67% by 2015, and 75% by 2020
- To reduce the amount of industrial and commercial waste sent to landfill to 80% of 2004 levels by 2010
“Household recycling” rates given in the chart above take account of materials sent for recycling, composting or reuse by local authorities, those collected from household sources by 'private/ voluntary' organisations and those taken as residual waste from households but diverted for recycling following a subsequent sorting process. It excludes material which was collected for recycling from households but was subsequently rejected. Despite increases in every year since 2000/01, only just over a third (34.7%) of household waste in the North East was recycled, re-used or composted in 2009/10. This is less than the England average of 39.7% and the UK Waste Strategy 2010 target of 40%.
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Municipal waste is any waste collected by a Waste Collection Authority, usually the local authority but sometimes contracted out to a private company. Municipal waste covers all household waste, and also includes waste from council operations and facilities such as schools, parks and gardens, and may include waste from shops, offices and other businesses.
In the North East, the proportion of municipal waste sent to landfill has been steadily declining since 2000/01. In the North East in 2009/10 the amount of municipal waste sent to landfill accounted for 44%, the first year in which less than half the total collected was sent to landfill, and slightly less than the English average. We recycle or compost less than the country as a whole but have historically produced more energy from our waste than the national average. There is only one municipal solid waste Energy from Waste facility in the North East at Billingham operated by Sita Tees Valley Limited. It receives about 6000 tonnes of municipal waste each week from Northumberland and Tees Valley authorities and produces in the order of 30MW of electricity – enough to provide for the needs of about 60,000 homes. Northumberland and Tees Valley authorities are committed to produce energy from all their residual waste in future.
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In future years, a combination of landfill taxes and reducing allowances under the Landfill Allowances Trading Scheme will make disposal to landfill increasingly expensive. The North East holds a valuable commercial resource in the number and size of its landfill sites - 10 years life left for non-hazardous waste at current disposal rates. This excess capacity, when compared to most other regions, attracts a significant quantity of “imported waste” to the North East.
Deposits to landfill peaked in 2005 and have shown an accelerating decline since then and, in 2008, were at their lowest level since 2000/01. Deposits decreased by over a million tonnes between 2007 and 2008, mainly as a result of the impact of the Landfill Directive and, in part, the onset of the recession. In 2008, the Construction and Demolition sector was responsible for the greatest proportion of waste sent to landfill - over 50% by weight.