Ignore product size and increase reward, argues advanced sustainable developments

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ASD is urging retailers to not differentiate between small and large plastics in deposit schemes.

Announcements from retailers advising only small bottles should be considered because they cause most litter and larger bottles could be exempted because they are mostly recycled at home, has quite rightly caused outrage amongst the sustainability community.

Ahmed Detta, CEO of ASD believes that recyclers should be agnostic to product sizes. He says, ‘we should not assume that people recycle at home. This is a challenging market and as a country we are struggling to recycle. We have to transform this country’s recycling industry and reward is the solution. Retailers should not be differentiating between size but should go further and increase the return deposit from 10p to 25p.’

Government must support councils to recycle locally and introduce innovative technology

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Advanced Sustainable Developments (ASD), welcomes the Government’s ‘long overdue’ waste strategy but urges the Government to be more transparent and help support local councils to recycle as much locally as possible.

Ahmed Detta, CEO of ASD says, the Government’s Resources and Waste Strategy is long overdue.

Detta says, ‘It’s astonishing that the last Government review into the UK’s waste strategy was 11 years ago.  This new strategy needs to be bold and most importantly, transparent.’

‘Here at ASD we believe that everyone needs to take responsibility for our waste: producer, consumer, recycler.’

Detta supports the Government’s proposals to tackle the recycling post-code lottery but argues that Government needs to go further and address the poor skill set in the industry.

Detta says, ‘Councils simply do not have the technical skill set inhouse to deliver solutions to our recycling problems.  The problem with PET plastic (the most ubiquitous of the 7 plastics recycled in the UK) needs to be central to our recycling strategy in the UK and Government must support innovation and introduce new technology.  Here at ASD our focus on PET will transform the way we recycle in the UK – using a circular economy to make single-use plastic a thing of the past’.

Detta believes that the recycling industry in the UK is inherently broken.  He says, ‘we need to overhaul the industry.  Every Council should have its own mini ecosystem where they can recycle as much locally as possible before transporting waste to landfills or selling abroad. Ideally, councils need to work collaboratively and have a strategic recycling plant next to major waste recovery facilities, with investment into companies both by producers and local Government.’

‘We must start looking at all waste streams properly to create a bold and long term strategy and not focus on easy fixes’.

Ahmed Detta, CEO of Enviroo looks at a new recycling system recently launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos

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Davos is a place where the world’s leaders come together to tackle the world’s problems. One of these problems is our environment and how we balance the needs of business with the importance of caring for our environment. This year Loop was launched at Davos and here are my views on it.

Hailed as a new way to recycle I have some questions about the programme.

  • The programme is providing elegant boxes to store products at home but the products still arrive in single use packages to the home, so how exactly are they changing behaviour? I put my cereals and other materials into my own tuppawear boxes, so what’s the big deal?
  • If a local council is providing at home recycling services, isn’t there a bigger carbon footprint created by this programme as they are doubling up on the collection process?
  • The manufacturers are ‘uniting’ but they are not collaborating to change design or process for these products in the first place – in my opinion they are palming off the responsibility to the consumer yet again – have to now store these special boxes for their products.
  • This is yet another recycle at home service which we don’t need.  On-the-go recycling is where the focus should be.