NERF Conference – Reflections on Waste, Complexity and Common Sense

I recently attended the North East Recycling Forum (NERF) annual conference at Newcastle Civic Centre. First things first: it’s a great venue. I had no idea Civic Centres had banqueting halls, but this one does, and it’s impressive. The event itself was well run, the speakers were strong, and there was a good mix of science and practical insight.

Now, I should say that many years ago I trained as a chemist. I don’t flex those particular mental muscles very often anymore, but they’re still there, and I can follow the scientific concepts. Even so, a lot of what was presented and discussed at NERF was extremely complex. And that’s really the point of this piece: these issues matter, they’re complicated, and if we want to bring the public with us on the journey of climate change and the environment, we must explain them simply. Right now, we don’t.

So, what follows isn’t a critique of any of the speakers, far from it, they were excellent. These are my takeaways from the day. And they point to a bigger issue: government policy has made waste, recycling and carbon management far more complicated than they need to be. And that complexity ultimately puts pressure on industry, and consumer.

Energy from Waste – The Penny Drops

The waste sector contributes 6% of all UK carbon emissions. For comparison: transport is 26%, residential 18%, and agriculture 11%.

So, waste isn’t the largest contributor, but it’s still significant. And the collection, transport ,and processing of waste all add to that footprint.

For many years, emissions from waste were falling, thanks largely to a major reduction in landfill. That was the big win. But as Energy from Waste (EfW) facilities began to increase across the UK, emissions understandably started to level off and rise slightly again.

And here’s the bit I’m almost embarrassed not to have realised sooner (despite having visited many EfWs)

Energy from Waste = Burning Carbon = Carbon Emissions.

“Energy from Waste” sounds clean, modern and almost circular—because in many ways, it is a smarter, more efficient way of handling residual waste. But it does still rely on combustion. And a portion of what we burn is fossil carbon - plastics, synthetic textiles and other polymer-based materials.

When you burn fossil carbon, you get fossil CO₂. It really is that simple.

The industry and government distinguish between:

• Biogenic carbon(food, paper, wood), and
• Fossil carbon(plastics and synthetics).

This distinction helps with reporting and carbon accounting, but it doesn’t change the fact that CO₂ is produced.

That said, EfW facilities are far from the villains of the story. In fact, compared to landfill, they solve several major environmental issues. Landfill releases methane, which is around 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years. Then there's leachate, risk of groundwater contamination, long-term site management, and eventual remediation—issues EfW avoids entirely.

EfW also delivers wider benefits. Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA) can be processed into secondary aggregate for pavements, road construction and other infrastructure. Every tonne of IBA reused is a tonne of virgin aggregate we don’t need to quarry. Valuable metals—steel, aluminium, copper—are also recovered from IBA rather than lost forever in landfill.

So EfW is not “bad”—it plays a critical role in managing the UK's residual waste, and it is unquestionably better than landfill. But “better than landfill” is not the same as “the end goal.”

Recycling Isn’t Simple – And We Pretend It Is

One of the biggest myths we tell the public is that recycling is simple. It isn’t.

We’ve spent years promoting the idea that you just put the right thing in the right bin and someone magically turns it into something new. The reality is that recycling in the UK is held together by an alphabet soup of policies, markets and incentives all wrapped up into handy acronyms: PRNs, PERNs, EPR, MRF contamination limits, local authority contracts and packaging guidelines.

The materials themselves aren’t the problem. The system we’ve built around them is.

Every local authority collects different materials. Every MRF has different capabilities. Every brand designs packaging differently. Recycling markets rise and fall with global commodity prices.

When the system is fragmented the industry spends more time navigating rule changes than improving outcomes. Meanwhile, consumers are left guessing whether a black plastic tray is recyclable in their postcode.

This complexity doesn’t help the environment, it causes confusion, apathy, and leaves consumers wondering why prices have gone up. Somebody has to pay for all this and while producers may attempt to absorb some of these costs, the easiest way forward for them to protect their profits is to pass the increased cost to consumers.

Deposit Return Schemes – Overthinking Something We Already Know How to Do

If EfW is a branding triumph, then the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) is the opposite: a simple idea made astonishingly complicated.

I know I’m looking back with a lot of nostalgia on this and I know these schemes were not formal, and generally local, associated with a brand but I remember taking glass pop bottles (they were Corona ones for those that can remember) back to the shop and getting money for them. No national infrastructure. No oversight bodies. No multi-million-pound contracts. You handed over the bottle, got your few pence, and everyone understood the transaction.

But somewhere along the way, a simple system turned into years of consultations, delays, administrators and rules about what counts and what doesn’t. The Scottish scheme alone cost hundreds of millions before collapsing.

We don’t need committees to tell people they’ll get money back if they return a bottle. We just need the incentive. A working DRS doesn’t require micromanagement, it requires clarity.

Now, we have the opposite: a perfect example of how policy can overcomplicate something people used to understand instinctively.

Closing: The Answers Are Simple - The Road There Less So

After spending the day at NERF, my biggest takeaway is this: we already know what the answers look like. We need better waste treatment technologies that reduce emissions—anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis, not just burning rubbish or burying it in the ground. We need to ditch the throwaway society, we need to reuse more, not invent clever ways to justify single-use packaging. We need to recycle properly, not pretend that a confusing patchwork of rules is helping anyone. And we need clean, renewable energy to power the system.

None of these ideas are new. They’re common sense.

The challenge isn’t the destination, it’s getting there through the maze of policies, committees and acronyms that have grown around the waste sector. The answers are simple. The road there, unfortunately, is anything but.