Critical assessment of the EU and UK waste legislation and the nature and issues within the agricultural waste sector
This blog is formed from work I undertook as part of an MSc in Environmental Management from the University of Derby from 2016-2019. This website serves as a repository for this work.
The following work was written in 2017
Agricultural waste (AW) is a broad term, defined by EIONET (2013) as:
“waste...composed of organic wastes (animal excreta in the form of slurries and farmyard manures, spent mushroom compost, soiled water and silage effluent) and waste such as plastic, scrap machinery, fencing, pesticides, waste oils and veterinary medicines.”
The broad nature of AW means that the different waste streams must be dealt with in specialist ways, bringing both challenges and opportunities. This essay sets out to assess if the EU and UK legislation has been successful in dealing with the waste management issues of this varied waste stream.
Within the EU, the disposal of AW is covered by the 2008 Waste Framework Directive (WFD) (2008/98/EC) (EU, 2008). This replaced WFD 75/442/EEC of 1975 (EU, 1975). WFD 2008 classes AW as industrial waste, with notable exceptions (EU, 2008). However, there is no further definition offered within the EU legislation pertaining to AW.
In the UK, the Waste Management (England & Wales) Regulations 2006 (as Amended) cover AW, though it is referred to as its somewhat vague Agriculture Act 1947 definition and not mentioned directly as a classification of waste (Aviva, 2008). The newest regulations amend the Waste Management (England & Wales) Regulations 2006, which themselves amend elements of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and implement the Landfill Directive (1999/31/EC) (Defra, 2014, EU, 1999).
In the case of both the EU and the UK, waste is classified by the European List of Wastes (2000/532/EC) and is assigned a 6-digit European Waste Catalogue (EWC) number (EA, 2015b). This number must be present on Waste Transfer Notes (WTN), which are issued by waste contractors disposing of waste from the farm or facility (Aviva, 2008). WTNs must be countersigned and filed for two years by the farmer or facility manager. Due to responses that the WTN system added to administration costs, from 2014, rules were relaxed to allow invoices and receipts to act as WTNs (NFU, 2014, Cloud Sustainability, 2014). Goulding (2014) disputes that this has the potential to dilute the effectiveness of the system, as there is the potential for less
detailed information about the waste to be recorded, though the UK Government has produced checklists for businesses to best fill in WTNs (Right Waste, Right Place, 2015).
Similar WTN systems are applied across the EU as per Directive 2008/98/EC. In Germany for example, the Abfallzeichnisverordnung covers the labelling of waste as per the EWC, as well as a WTN system (BJV, 2001).
Responsibility for the correct sorting and disposal of waste lies with the farm or facility operator as per the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2010. They are expected to abide by a duty of care, set by the Environment Agency (EA) and Defra (2014).
This duty of care covers the classification and storage of waste, as well as putting in place the correct registration, permits for creating transit sites & exempted materials, and for checking that external contractors are also suitably registered (Defra, 2009). The onus is consequently put on the producer of the waste to deal with its correct disposal. A reliance on the waste producers to regulate the waste contractors, and too few inspections by regulators, leads to relatively poor enforcement of the regulations (ESAET, 2015).
In the UK, the EA and Local Authorities (LA) are responsible for the enforcement of the WTN system. Farmers must register with the EA should they wish to collect or store materials on their land, or apply for an exemption, e.g. if they wish to use waste materials in construction on their land (Defra, 2016).
Should the operator be found to be in breach of the regulations, the EA or LA can enforce a Fixed Penalty Notice of up to £300. Further or more extreme breaches of the legislation can lead to prison sentences (Defra, 2016) (EMS, 2016). In 2011 the EA made 335 successful prosecutions for illegal waste activity, netting £1,7m in fines (EA, 2011). In 2015 however, waste crime was still estimated to cost the English economy £604m (ESAET, 2015).
While the Fixed Penalty Notices and prosecutions have led to a fall in waste crime and an increase in recycling and the correct disposal of waste, there has been criticism of the increased administrative burden on farmers (NFU, 2014b). Defra, as
well as rural businesses such as Rural Waste Recycling in Herefordshire, have made improvements to help the farmers meet their goals. Rural Waste Recycling offers a free drop-off service for paper and plastics to farmers. Despite the improvements, it is clear that some recent changes to legislation have had negative effects on rural communities, such as the increased administrative burden and the issue of waste crime, which will be covered in more detail later (NFU, 2014a) (Hereford Times, 2016).
The difficulty in securing convictions is partly due to how AW has been somewhat overlooked in the past. WFD 1975 prescribed targets for waste reduction and implemented the Waste Hierarchy, but didn’t specify AW (EU, 1975). The UK’s definition of AW is still that used in the Agriculture Act 1947:
“Waste from premises used for agriculture within the meaning of the Agriculture Act 1947, the Agriculture (Scotland) Act 1948 or the Agriculture Act (Northern Ireland) 1949”.
Agriculture, as defined by the Act covers horticulture, fruit and seed growing, dairy farming and livestock breeding as well as maintaining grazing and meadow land, market gardens and nurseries (Agriculture Act, 1947).
This definition would have been more suitable for the time it was created, with the majority of AW in the late 1940s being natural in origin and able to be returned to the land by land spreading (in the case of manure), or burnt (in the case of hessian or crop residue) (WDTVLIVE42, 2017).
Traditionally this waste would have been dealt with on the farm in a somewhat closed system. However, with legislative changes, such as the Waste Management (England and Wales) Regulations 2006, some established forms of disposal such as burning were no longer allowed (except in the case of plant tissue and untreated wood waste) (EA, 2015a). The exemptions system has the potential to cause confusion. In 2016, a farmer in Durham was fined £5400 for spreading unsuitable waste on his farm. The waste had been delivered by a waste processing company, but due to a lack of understanding on the part of both the farmer and the waste transporter, the incorrect type of waste for the purpose had been delivered (EA, 2016)
Since the 1947 definition, the amount of non-natural waste produced by farms has significantly increased (Orzolek, 2017). Plastic packaging as well as a much greater array of pesticides and other chemicals mean that the AW stream has vastly broadened in its variety (EIONET, 2013, CIWM, 2017)
Even in subsequent amendments to the Waste Management Regulations and to the WFD, there has been no updated legal definition for AW. With a lack of definition clarity, it is also difficult to obtain accurate data on the amount of waste produced by farming. Lack of data prompted the 2003 Agricultural Waste Survey by the EA, which found that farms produced 550,000 tonnes of non-natural waste per year, including 85,000 tonnes of plastic waste (AWPCRP, 2011); however, regular data on AW is not collected, unlike data on Municipal Waste (EU, 2005).
On the one hand, the situation presents with the described lack of definitional clarity, on the other hand, this lack of clarity on the definition of AW comes as the EU Landfill directive (1999/31/EC) and UK Government’s subsequent introduction of a Landfill Tax have increased the cost of disposal of unprocessed waste by landfill.
ESAET (2015) argue that this higher cost of landfill has led to an increase in fly tipping. There has been a 7% year-on-year increase in fly tipping since 2011 (Guardian, 2017). Rural communities find themselves most heavily effected, as the majority of fly tipping happens out of towns, in the countryside.
This situation cannot be helped by the watering-down of WTN rules, as amended in the new Waste Management Regulations. Indeed, during the consultation on the amendments, 60% of respondents were opposed to this change (Goulding, 2014).
Farmers and the rural community themselves are in favour of ways to better deal with their waste management problems. Farming UK (2007) points to research carried out by Agri.cycle, showing that UK farmers would welcome initiatives that help them to recycle their waste. Agri.cycle’s concept would include a points system for good waste management. A similar study in Canada found that farmers were equally open to instigating systems aimed at increasing recycling of farm waste (Muise, et al., 2016).
The UK Government has unveiled plans to roll out edoc (electronic duty of care), a system aimed at simplifying the WTN system further, while maintaining the high standards of the reporting. Goulding (2014) however points to the results of the Government’s own Red Tape report, that shows this is not seen by its future users as an improvement, but rather an additional administrative hurdle. This lack of proper consultation with the future end users of the regulations is unhelpful in ensuring full support of the new system.
Some firms and waste organisations including B&M & CIWM (2014 & 2016) are more optimistic about the chances of the edoc system. In their Rethinking Waste Crime (2015) report, ESAET are also hopeful about the new system, though make a number of recommendations, including a modernising of the system, a reduction of the exemptions at waste sites, setting higher standards for the registration of the waste transport industry. They also suggest stricter enforcement of the regulations by creating a new inspection regime for waste transfer sites. At the moment EA & LA inspectors are often under-resourced; the PSHO (2010) points to the example of how the EA and two LAs were unable to stop the regular burning and dumping of waste on a rural site over a period of seven years, due to mismanagement of the investigation process between the three authorities.
In conclusion, with the Waste Framework Directive & Landfill Directive (1999/31/EC) the EU has put into place some reasonable targets and regulation to aid with separation of waste and to keep usable materials out of landfill. There have been significant increases in recycling and large-scale reductions in landfilling since 2008. However, due to the lack of a clear definition of AW at the EU level, policies have allowed AW, with its broad waste stream, to fall between the gaps in the UK regulations. Without guidance from the EU, the UK should look to update its definition of AW, in order to help the farming community with the challenges of adhering to the regulations. There needs to be clearer guidance on the exemptions and limits of exempted materials, both from the EU and UK Governments.
As has been shown, the UK Government needs to build better on the foundation of the Waste Framework Directive and tighten up the regulation surrounding waste carriers and WTNs by a reduction of the exemptions at waste sites and setting higher standards for the registration of the waste transport industry. It needs to educate
farmers and the public to the WTN requirements, and it needs to increase, rather than decrease the amount of data required on WTNs. With this data, statistical analysis of the waste streams would be improved, leading to improvements in the system, though as discussed, more involvement from those effected by the changes would ensure better utilisation of the new system.
The UK Government should make it easier for rural communities to create waste transfer sites, as in the example of Rural Waste Recycling (Hereford Times, 2016). Without clearer guidance, and a clearer administrative regime, the success of EU & UK waste management legislation in the AW sector will be limited.
