A 21st Century Resource Strategy for Newcastle

Newcastle City Council has embarked on a review of its waste strategy that will hopefully make it progressively more sustainable right through until 2025.  As part of this review the authority is obliged to carry out a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA).  One central element of the SEA process is public consultation on what we the service users think should be part of future policy.

Through the first part of 2006, up until August, the stages of the process have been defined and mapped out, consultants engaged and stakeholders’ opinions sought.

Before the general process of consultation can be started it is necessary to refine and define the parameters of that consultation through the means of a process known as scoping.  To achieve this two panels consisting of residents and stakeholders respectively were enrolled: the residents’ panel drawn from a wider group of residents who had indicated a willingness to be consulted on issues that may affect the citizens of the city and the stakeholders’ panel drawn from organisations that could be seen to have an interest in waste policy development, such as the Environment Agency, the Fire Service and Ban Waste.

Each panel met three times during June and July and a panel of elected members met once during the same period.  The format for the two main panels was the same in each session and the conduct of each session was managed by the consultants.

Session 1

The consultants gave a presentation that covered four main areas:

• What currently happens with waste in Newcastle and why it needs to change.  Leading to
• The local, regional, national and european context.
• The Waste Hierarchy in relation to the SEA process.
• Selecting the most relevant criteria - a start.

The residents’ panel then gave it’s views on ways to minimise waste and the selection of criteria, as did the stakeholders. See also residents and stakeholders lists of ‘action ideas’ that could possibly contribute to waste minimisation in Newcastle.

Session 2

In an initial presentation the consultants

• gave a recap of the content of the previous session,
• introduced the idea of inverting the waste hierarchy and how to deliver it,
• mapped out the rest of the process from developing assessment criteria to waste management options, modelling and assessing performance of options, weighting criteria and finally combining  performance and options to give an overall score. See the slide ‘Stages in the Process’ on the linked presentation above.
• Expanding and grouping the criteria by categories such as environmental and socio-economic, before consolidating them by factors such as hierarchy and deliverability.

 See the Residents' Report and the Stakeholders' Report on these proceedings.  Also during this workshop the Citizens’ Panel and Stakeholder Group for their views on performance targets for each level of the Waste Hierarchy. Participants were asked to allocate percentages up to 100% to each element of the Waste Hierarchy.  The results are shown here. They include Newcastle's targets for Recycling and Composting in relation to the national targets.

Session 3

The final presentation attempted to pull it all together:

• weighting the assessment criteria,
• the proposed targets for Newcastle for reduction, re-use and recycling as a % of total waste arising,
• possible changes to recycling and waste collection services,
• and residual treatment technologies. 

See Resident Report and Stakeholders Report for details on what happened after the presentation.

After the event those members of the Residents and Stakeholder panels who had requested it were sent copies of a report on the pros and cons of the various technologies available to treat the residual waste.  Click here to access it.