February’s Waste Thoughts – 2025

Our next Zoom meeting is on Tuesday 11th March 7pm – Please contact simongibbon@casav.uk for further details.

Full notes below, quick summary – follow links for the detail:

Actions:

  • Kate – find out through Surfers Against Sewage / Plastic Free Communities how the Skipton and Craven PFC is working with NYC.
  • Tracey confirm NYC ok for a trial Give and/or Take event.
  • All – please send any suitable questions for Any Questions to simon.gibbon@casav.uk.
  • Simon set up WhatsApp group to connect all the local repair cafes for support / skill sharing.

Background – Our Monthly Waste Discussions

If you have just signed up to the Waste Group, then welcome, I hope these notes of our discussion make sense.

We meet once a month to talk about topics connected to waste and plan / report progress on our ongoing activities such as the Repair Cafes, Foodshare, Refill scheme and events such as the Bilsdale Show.  If you visit the “Thoughts on Waste” page on the CASaV website you can find all our past discussions – https://climateactionstokesleyandvillages.org/waste/thoughts-on-waste/

Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Notes form 11th February 2025 CASaV Waste Group

Previous Meeting Actions

Tracey – discover North Yorkshire Council involvement in Skipton / Craven Plastic Free Community and NYC’s ability to be involved in any new ones.

Not been able to find who has taken over Skipton/Craven Council, but still on going in NYC.

Action: Kate – find out through Surfers Against Sewage / Plastic Free Communities how the Skipton and Craven PFC is working with NYC.

Identified first potential plastic reduction action for NYC. Currently reviewing purchasing for cleaning products – good opportunity to include reduction in plastics as part of contract brief. Also ask to make phosphate free product a requirement, phosphate are serious issue in rivers causing nutrification. While phosphate absorbing blocks have been demonstrated which are then transported to a field where the phosphate is released to act as a fertiliser. It is far better to not release phosphate.

Tracey would be our PFC contact in NYC.

When PFC were discussed at the last CASaV meeting a number of people were keen to get invovled. Next step is to get individual parish councillors to be the key point for individual villages. Then Kate would coordinate all to NYC.

Tracey discuss with NYC’s commercial waste director how to make Give and/or Take events possible across the whole of North Yorkshire.

Spoken to Ryedale easy to do as no transaction of money so agreed to not charge in anyway for waste collection, everything taken to household waste and then sort into books / textiles / electrical / to correct part of recycling centre. Best way forward for us looks like being to sell the first one as a trial as we don’t really know how much material would be left – agree with Yorwaste then pass by operations – next step check with contracts.

Likely venue is Stokesley Town Hall possibly trial event downstairs room, full scale event may work best in Methodist hall.

Next Ryedale Give/Take events – Pickering Sunday 2nd March, Malton / Norton Saturday 15th March.

We would plan to copy the Ryedale process for running Give/Take events.

Action: Tracey confirm NYC ok for a trial Give and/or Take event.

Updates

Kate

Thanks to Repair Cafe Sewing Team who made 50 morsbags – morsbags lasts 500 times longer than plastic bag). They were given away at Saturday’s Stokesley Repair Cafe filled with items to encourage sustainable living. Thanks to North Yorkshire Rotters for leaflets and food saving devices. Thanks to Eileen for getting leaflets and seeds from Coop. The bags so included a leaflet explaining how to make your own bag and ways to reduce your environment and climate impact in 6 other ways. There were also seeds in recycled paper. Giving away the bags instigated conversations with over 50 people on waste reduction and other climate actions, with people wanting to give their own spare fabric to stop it going to waste.

Joanna, Jane and Jo, part of the Repair Cafe Sewing Team, are keen to set up a “Clothes Swap“. They are trialling this with a Clothes Rail at the Repair Cafes regularly with any untaken surplus clothes going to Food Share team to be given to NiteLight or directly to the Salvation Army. Then they would like to organise a separate cloth swap event.

The Station Coffee + Kitchen in Stokesley have a number of vegan cookery books plus Farmagedon and Sixty Harvests Left for people to borrow who come in. They are happy for us to put our books on eco themes, such as growing your own, zero carbon, sustainable living, for people to take on the shelf. We could then advertise that people can visit to borrow them. Should be a win-win we get somewhere for our books that is open for people to borrow / read which may also bring people to the Station who haven’t been before. Each book has the CASaV ex-libris sticker in it and will have a CASaV bookmark.

One of the books at the Station will be the The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning if you have environmental / nature / environmental science books then please send them in our direction, or the North Yorkshire Moors National Park Centre at Sutton Bank takes books to raise money for the park, if the books are out of date then WeBuyBooks or WorldOfBooks will give you pennies to pounds for each book but it ensures the books are reused – you use their apps to scan the ISBN number of your book, the app tells you whether they will buy the book or not, then you package the books to send to them using the free shipping label(s) you print from the pdf(s) they email you, when the books are received they check them and pay you depending on condition etc..

The Repair Cafe funds can be used to fund prizes for the Food competition being run where school children are submitting recipes which stop food going to waste.

Pete

Finding that more catastrophic the world is then the tighter my focus is to my locality. So having been staring at our uncut verges around, been taking some of the dried stems, bundling them together and using the band saw cut into 6″ lengths to make EarWeGo hotels for insects based on an idea from the Sussex University Buzz Club. While no doubt the bugs do / could find other places to shelter, humans notice them and it makes people aware of the threats faced by insects and particularly children notice these things.

The King and Queen are in Middlesbrough next Thursday 13th to open the International Centre and will in Central Square meeting the people from 1pm – 3pm.

Joy

Another Repair Cafe filming session which will be great source of inspirational materials for our new TikTok account and other social media uses.

Helen

Great example of reuse of textiles at this Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) exhibition – “Winifred Nicholson – Cumbrian Rag Rugs” which is on until 23rd March. She used a different method to standard rag rugs with loop on the visible side, they wonderful to look at, all made from old clothes cut up, but by the photographs of the rugs in their original locations (farmhouse kitchens) you can see how hard wearing they are.

Fred

Curtain Boutique in Guisborough gives away bags of off-cuts.

Plastic Free Communities (PFC) – Guisborough has 2 refill shops – the Hairdressers and the Health Food shop.

Jemma Joy at the last Guisborough Repair Cafe collected clothes for Nitelite.

Incinerator (Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility – TV ERF) – the planning was granted by 2 out of 6 people on the planning committee – 2 yes, 1 no, 3 abstained.

Mary Creagh, the circular economy minister, has introduced new rules for incinerators, which require mean less waste is burnt, making it more difficult to get approval for new incinerators. However, many incinerators like TV ERF have already passed planning permission and got the necessary environmental permits.

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council (RCBC) send 4000 tonnes of waste to landfill. RCBC greener future website advertises the incinerator as a green and sustainable solution.

RCBC vote in April / May on economic value is the last chance to stop TV ERF.

Looking for a Powerpoint presentation for a public meeting on the incinerator.

DEFRA policy on recycling requires separating paper and cardboard at kerbside from other recycling in order to increase quality of recycled material. NYC is about to give final approval to the switch to 2 recycling bins which will be separating paper and card from other recycling at kerbside. This will start first in Ryedale based on vehicle replacement contracts before introducing the 2 bins for recycling.

RCBC – has a recycling rate of 30% – 17% green waste with only 13% being what we normally thing of a recycled materials. NYC recycling rate 46% (Hambleton was 50%) – Tracey.

For comparison Tracey has been able to give us the provisional NYC published figures (unlikely to change though) for 2023/24 are as follows:
Percentage household waste sent for Reuse,Recycling or Composting (Provisional) 42.8%
Percentage of household waste arisings which have been sent for recycling (Provisional) 21.99%
Percentage of household waste sent for composting or anaerobic digestion (Provisional) 20.49%

We no longer report just the kerbside collected tonnages, as a unitary authority we have to report the Household Waste Recycling Centre waste as well, which is reflected in the relatively low recycling rate. However, as a comparison in 22/23 the highest performing council in England was still only achieving a 61.6% recycling rate and the highest performing Unitary Council waste at 58.1%. Wales who are second in the world for recycling have an average recycling rates of 66%.

Anne

School competition going well with lots of entries, recipes which reduce food going to waste. It is Food Waste Action Week – 17th – 23rd March, so we hope to be able to share some of the recipes with you in time for then.

Looking into using surplus insulation normally used behind radiators as a material to be used in school for experiments around keeping warm.

Simon

I have used ChatGPT to get summaries on a few topics of interest, basically it searches the web and then makes a summary, so if it reads rubbish it reproduces rubbish, so read with care.

TV ERF:
As of February 2025, the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TV ERF) has secured the necessary planning permissions and environmental permits, and the project is advancing toward the construction phase. The opportunity for formal objections during the statutory consultation periods has concluded.

Project Milestones:
Planning Permissions: Outline planning permission was granted in July 2020, followed by the approval of reserved matters in July 2023. These applications underwent public consultations, during which stakeholders could submit objections or comments. – TVERF.CO.UK
Environmental Permit: The Environment Agency issued the environmental permit for the facility in August 2024, following a comprehensive evaluation and public consultation process.

Current Status:
With the completion of these regulatory processes, the project is moving forward, and the formal avenues for objection have closed. However, community members and stakeholders can still engage with the project through other means:
Community Engagement: The project team has committed to ongoing communication with the public. Individuals with concerns or questions can reach out via the contact form on the official project website.
Political Advocacy: Local representatives, such as Redcar MP Anna Turley, have expressed opposition to the project. Engaging with elected officials can be an effective way to voice concerns and seek representation.

While the formal objection periods have concluded, staying informed and participating in community discussions can influence ongoing and future aspects of the project.

Landfill vs Incinerator

The CO2 emissions comparison between landfill and incineration depends on several factors, including methane emissions from landfill, energy recovery efficiency from incineration, and the composition of the waste. Here’s a breakdown of the key considerations:

1. Carbon Impact of Landfill vs. Incineration

Landfill:
Organic waste in landfill decomposes anaerobically, producing methane (CH4), a greenhouse gas around 28 times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year period.
Methane capture systems can reduce emissions, but they are not 100% effective. UK landfills capture 50-75% of methane at best, with the rest escaping into the atmosphere.
Non-organic materials (plastics, metals) are relatively inert in landfill, meaning they don’t release significant emissions, but they don’t contribute to energy recovery either.

Incineration (Energy-from-Waste, EfW):
Incinerators directly emit CO? when burning waste, with plastics (fossil-based) contributing the most.
Typical UK EfW plants emit ~0.6?1.2 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of waste burned (including biogenic CO2 from organic waste).
However, EfW displaces fossil-fuel electricity generation, reducing emissions from coal or gas plants.

2. UK Emissions Data & Studies

Zero Waste Scotland (2022) found that EfW produces more CO2 per tonne of waste than landfill (even with methane leakage considered), due to high fossil-based content in waste (e.g., plastics).
The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC, 2021) noted that landfill is often lower in emissions than incineration, particularly when waste composition shifts towards plastics.
The European Environment Agency (EEA, 2021) concluded that EfW is only beneficial if it replaces coal-fired electricity. In the UK, where the grid is increasingly renewable, this benefit is shrinking.

3. Key Considerations for CO? Impact

If plastic waste is incinerated, EfW produces more CO2 than landfill, because plastics don’t biodegrade in landfill but release fossil CO2 when burned.
If organic waste is landfilled, methane emissions make landfill worse unless methane capture is highly effective.
If waste is reduced, reused, or recycled, both landfill and incineration emissions are avoided, which is the best option.

Conclusion

Incineration is likely to have a higher CO2 impact than landfill, particularly due to plastic combustion.
The best approach is waste prevention, recycling, and composting rather than relying on either landfill or incineration.
In a UK context, where the electricity grid is becoming greener and landfill methane capture is improving:
Would you like help finding local data or studies on your specific region?s EfW plant emissions?

As of February 2025, specific local data comparing the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TV ERF) to those of local landfill sites is limited. However, available information provides some insights:

Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TV ERF):
Emissions Monitoring: The TV ERF is designed to continuously monitor emissions, including carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ammonia, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and particulates. This monitoring ensures that the facility operates within environmental regulations and provides data on its emissions profile. – CONSULT.ENVIRONMENT-AGENCY.GOV.UK
Carbon Reduction Initiatives: The facility aims to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by diverting waste from landfills and converting residual waste into energy. By processing waste that would otherwise decompose anaerobically in landfills (producing methane, a potent GHG), the TV ERF seeks to mitigate overall GHG emissions. – TVERF.CO.UK

Landfill Emissions in Tees Valley:
Regional CO2 Emissions: The Tees Valley region has historically exhibited significant CO2 emissions, primarily due to industrial activities. For instance, in 2005, the combined CO2 emissions for the Tees Valley councils were approximately 18,929 kilotonnes. By 2015, this figure had decreased to around 14,063 kilotonnes, reflecting efforts to reduce emissions across various sectors. – MODERNGOV.MIDDLESBROUGH.GOV.UK
Waste Management Strategies: The Tees Valley Joint Waste Management Strategy emphasizes reducing waste generation, enhancing recycling efforts, and exploring sustainable waste treatment solutions to minimize reliance on landfills and associated emissions. – MODERNGOV.MIDDLESBROUGH.GOV.UK

Conclusion:
While precise, up-to-date local data directly comparing CO2 emissions from the TV ERF and regional landfills is not readily available, the strategic direction in Tees Valley focuses on reducing landfill use due to its higher GHG emissions potential. Energy recovery facilities like the TV ERF are part of this strategy, aiming to manage residual waste more sustainably and mitigate overall CO2 emissions.
For the most current and detailed emissions data, it is advisable to consult local environmental agencies or the official TV ERF project communications, which may provide specific metrics as the facility becomes operational and monitoring data is collected.

Status of EPR

As of February 2025, the UK’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for packaging is progressing towards full implementation. The EPR framework mandates that businesses supplying or importing packaging are responsible for the costs associated with managing packaging waste, including its collection, recycling, and disposal. This initiative aims to incentivize producers to minimize packaging waste and enhance recyclability.

Key Developments:
Data Reporting Requirements: Starting from January 2023, obligated businesses have been required to collect detailed data on the packaging they supply or import. Large producers submitted their first full-year data in April 2024, covering activities from 2023. The next submission deadline for large producers is April 2025, focusing on data from the second half of 2024. Small producers will submit their initial data report in April 2025, encompassing their 2024 packaging activities.
Fee Implementation: While the EPR scheme was initially set to introduce fees in 2024, these have been deferred to 2025. Consequently, businesses are not required to pay EPR packaging fees in 2024 but must continue data collection and reporting as stipulated. The fees, calculated based on the type and volume of packaging placed on the market, will fund local authorities’ costs for managing household packaging waste.
Scheme Administration: The EPR scheme is administered by Pack UK (also referred to as Pecyn UK), which is responsible for setting packaging fee rates, collecting fees from producers, and disbursing payments to local authorities. Additionally, Pack UK will lead campaigns to encourage proper disposal of packaging waste and reduce littering.

Industry Concerns:
The introduction of EPR fees has raised concerns among businesses, particularly regarding the financial impact on products packaged in materials like glass. For instance, companies such as Fentimans have expressed apprehension that the additional costs could significantly affect their profitability, potentially leading to price increases for consumers. Industry groups have urged the government to reconsider the fee structure to mitigate potential economic impacts.
Next Steps:
Businesses obligated under the EPR scheme should continue to collect and report packaging data in compliance with the established timelines. It is essential to stay informed about updates from regulatory bodies and prepare for the financial implications of the forthcoming fees in 2025. Engaging with industry associations and compliance schemes can provide additional support and guidance during this transition.

Status of DRS

In summary, the UK Deposit Return Scheme is progressing towards its planned launch in October 2027, with variations in scope and implementation across the devolved administrations.
As of February 2025, the UK’s Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) is scheduled to launch in October 2027. This initiative aims to reduce litter and increase recycling by adding a refundable deposit to certain single-use drink containers. The scheme will encompass containers made primarily from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, aluminium, and steel, ranging in size from 150 millilitres to 3 litres. Notably, glass containers are excluded from the DRS in England and Northern Ireland.
In November 2024, the Welsh Government announced its withdrawal from the UK-wide DRS, citing challenges related to the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020. Wales intends to develop its own scheme, which will include glass containers, to better align with its environmental objectives and high recycling rates.
The UK Government remains committed to implementing the DRS across England, Northern Ireland, and Scotland by the revised 2027 timeline. The Deposit Management Organisation (DMO), responsible for overseeing the scheme’s operations, is expected to be appointed by April 2025. This body will provide detailed guidance to businesses and consumers in preparation for the scheme’s rollout.
The phased implementation plan includes establishing regulations and appointing the DMO by spring 2025, setting up the DMO between spring 2025 and spring 2026, and rolling out the necessary infrastructure and business preparations from spring 2026 to autumn 2027. The DRS is anticipated to be fully operational by October 2027.
The exclusion of glass containers from the DRS in England and Northern Ireland has been a point of contention. Environmental groups argue that including glass is essential for maximizing environmental benefits, while the government cites concerns over increased complexity and costs associated with handling glass.

YNYCA – Carbon Negative Challenge Fund – https://yorknorthyorks-ca.gov.uk/project/carbon-negative-challenge-fund/

Matters Arising

Hutton Rudby Any Questions – looking for topical / local questions which will be selected, the website has some good guidelines too. Kate had a question selected at when Any Questions was in Saltburn in August 2023 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001p7s4 – 12minutes 40seconds.

Action: All – any suitable questions for Any Questions.

Heather burning – “Lie of the Land” by Guy Shurbshole has some horrifying record “bag” 1000 grouse in one day, 40 million pheasant chicks released every year – catagorised as wild animals.

Repair Cafes

18 January Swainby – 43 items

8th February Stokesley – 80 items

Looking at possibly rearranging the entrance layout for future repair cafes in Stokesley Globe. With Front of House being in the Council Offices across the corridor, then more people to explain background to Repair Cafe and wider actions of CASaV.

15th March Swainby

As its March the plan is to have a theme around growing and food. So the Post Office room to have a display on growing. It is Food Waste Action Week – 17th – 23rd March, so we could have a tasting table – food from surplus, for example potato peeling crisps.

We have a request for a repair to an old poster, perhaps other repair cafes could have the specific skills we need.

Action: Simon set up WhatsApp group to connect all the local repair cafes for support / skill sharing.

15th February – Northallerton Repair Cafe planning meeting.

Meetings

AOB

Malton’s Beyond Plastic Group met with Tracey
May want to get in touch

Next Meeting

Tuesday 11th March 7pm – Please contact simongibbon@casav.uk for further details.