Yesterday, I attended the North East Recycling Forum (NERF) Annual Conference in the impressive setting of Durham Town Hall (see pic). I love this event as there’s always an impressive roster of speakers and I’ve known some of the regulars for twenty years so it is good to catch up.

The keynote speaker this year was Harriet Lamb, CEO of the Waste & Resources Action Plan (WRAP) who spoke at length on the circular economy. She said 500,000 people were already working in the circular economy in the UK and WRAP expected this to double. She talked about how progress in the textile industry had been wiped out by rising consumption.

One of the priorities for the Circular Economy Taskforce Lamb described was eliminating planned obsolescence. When it came to the questions, I asked how this ban would manifest itself and it sounds like any measure that was deemed to be planned obsolescence could be challenged in court in the way anti-competitive behaviour can be. While I can see this being straightforward if a manufacturer, say, deliberately slowed the performance of old models of a phone, there will be all kinds of grey areas eg backwards compatibility of software and accessories.

The middle two presentations were more technical and delivered by Stuart Hayward-Higham of Suez. The first was his own and the second was meant to be delivered by a DEFRA representative but the latter had called in sick. For somebody delivering somebody else’s presentation at 15 minutes notice, Hayward-Higham did a bloody good job – you could hardly tell. However I was disappointed the DEFRA rep couldn’t make it as I feel they are still looking at the Circular Economy from the waste perspective, not the raw material perspective or at best extended producer responsibility (ERP), as I raised at a previous event (or events – it’s a bugbear of mine). We need to create demand to pull these materials through the loop or the circular economy won’t work – ERP does this to a certain extent but it always feels like an afterthought.

The final presentation was a delight for a geek like me – the history of waste by Dr Henry Irving of Leeds Beckett University. Did you know that to build King’s Cross station in 1851, a huge ash heap had to be removed first? It was dug up and shipped to Moscow to help rebuild that city. Dr Irving moved on to the first kerbside collection of waste during the Second World War to provide materials for the war effort. He didn’t, however, mention my favourite fact: much of the metal collected (particularly all those beautiful wrought iron railings) were unsuitable for munitions or tanks and were quietly dumped out of sight. So much ferrous metal was dumped in the Thames Estuary that to this day shipping is warned not to rely on magnetic compasses in the vicinity. This rather illustrates my point that the circular economy is all about demand for materials – trying to push unwanted materials into the loop simply won’t work.

It was another great event – thanks to the NERF/genee team who put it together.