Clearly the need to reduce organics destined to landfill is a obligatory response to methane emissions and their capture, or reduction, significantly contributes to emissions reductions.

Here, biomaterials play a small but important role because of their capacity to increase organics recycling and reduce packaging waste. Getting such messages across in an arena dominated by the debate on energy is quite an awesome task, but we had some positive results as waste management was raised by many countries in specific meetings regarding methane and black soot emissions. This means more funding will go to the sector in future spending plans on emissions abatement. 

The overall outcome of the conference was, as we have read, positive. Criticisms regarding the lack of obligatory targets and a soft approach to monitoring miss the point.

The point is: diplomacy has succeeded and our thanks and compliments must go to the French Government and the UNFCCC negotiators in the UN secretariat. This is a big win for the United Nations. It puts international consensus politics back to the centre of resolving seemingly intractable crises and one can only hope this gives a push for resolution of other conflicts, of which the Middle East is the centre.

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George Osborne’s Spending Review on 25 November came and went, and I get the feeling everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief. At least we now know what the government’s cuts through to 2020 are going to be and now we can move on and try to deal with them.

Quite how they will work out in terms of individual programmes, departments, loss of expertise and personnel, has yet to be understood. Certainly we will lose some continuity.

A review of government spending plans until 2020 can be seen by clicking here.

• The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) faces some cuts, with spending expected to rise to £1.7bn in 2016/17 and reduce to £1.4bn by 2019/20.
• The Department for Business, Innovation & Science (BIS) faces a reduction in spending from £12.9bn in this year to £11.5bn in 2019/20 – a 10 per cent reduction.
• The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) budget remains unchanged, surprising many of us who expected severe cuts.
• Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all receive a slight increase in funding from central government. Local government will be given the right to levy additional taxes for social spending and for fighting crime.

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BBIA participated in the EC’s consultation on the Package, giving its views on how bioeconomy and circular economy are inextricably linked.

The package has many facets to it: revisions of the Packaging Directive, the Waste Directive, new targets for landfill reduction, and a revision of the Batteries and WEEE Directive.

There are many positive elements: a target for landfill diversion of 90 per cent of waste by 2030 which will certainly require extraordinary efforts in most EU nations; a target of 65 per cent recycling by 2030 and higher targets for packaging waste recycling, especially plastics, with 75 per cent to be recycled by 2030. Moreover, the EC proposes strengthening and harmonising Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems, which are currently extremely heterogeneous and difficult to monitor in what is supposed to be a single market. Finally, all countries ‘should’ separately collect biowaste, although they can choose to do so according to the economic and logistical conditions they face in each area.

This is a weakness of course and was clearly imposed upon the EC by eastern governments unwilling to face the cost of organics collection – especially where overall recycling is still less than 10 per cent – and it is contradictory to EU emissions targets under the climate change agreements.

However, on a positive note, the 65 per cent recycling target is not achievable without intercepting organics, so this strengthens those pushing for organics collection and is potentially good for the use of biobags in such systems.

The Package also promotes redesign of packaging and other products to enhance their recyclability and to reduce waste, creating an opening for the use of biomaterials in new product design.

You can download all the documents included in the launch of the European Commission’s Circular Economy package here.

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This is a good recognition of the work we are undertaking. However, at the same time underlines how the government thinks bioeconomy is about research and development, not about implementation and policies.

We remind all readers they can download the CEBR report on the Role of Bioplastics in the UK Economy for free by clicking here.

BBIA Managing Director David Newman and Technical Director Dr John Williams will be meeting officials from BIS on 15 December to discuss the CEBR report and how BIS can help drive momentum around bioeconomy investments.

George Freeman, Undersecretary of State at BIS responsible for Life Sciences, has declared his support for the bioeconomy sector and encouraged BIS officials to continue working to develop the industry. A more detailed, reserved report of the meeting will be made available for BBIA members shortly.

The post BBIA Policy Activities Update – December appeared first on BBIA.