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At COP29 a Ministerial Meeting on the Circular Economy Transition was held on 16th November 2024, with the sub-title: Towards a Climate Resilient and Sustainable Future via Resource-Efficiency. This emphasised the importance of circular solutions to the triple environmental crisis facing the planet: the crisis of climate change; the crisis of nature, biodiversity and land loss; and the crisis of pollution and waste.
What is the link between Materials and Waste and carbon emissions reduction? An assessment based on the availability and use of critical materials, waste infrastructure capacity, and proposed management routes, especially for those materials that can be used as feedstocks or valuable materials for other uses, reiterated the importance of circular economy principles and carbon emissions reduction going hand in hand.
The Carbon Waste and Resources Metric (Carbon WARM) is a set of conversion factors that enable users to express waste management tonnage data in terms of their Greenhouse Gas emissions relative to landfills. It was developed by Wrap on behalf of Defra to allow monitoring and evaluation of the Resources and Waste Strategy’s Greenhouse Gas emissions impact.
Carbon WARM is also suitable for use by local authorities, waste management companies and other organisations looking to understand the Greenhouse Gas impacts of their waste management decisions in different ways, for example:
- Monitoring and reporting on the CO2e saved by moving waste management further up the hierarchy.
- Calculating the proportion of the potential CO2e saving that has been realised.
- Modelling the GHG impacts of different combinations of waste management options
Our team’s materials and waste experience have included waste audits for TfL, developing the Resource Management Plan approach and tools for Wrap, and writing circular economy statements supporting planning applications and materials and waste chapters for environmental statements (ES). We have also reviewed materials and waste ES chapters for local authorities and London boroughs to ensure regulatory compliance and good practice, alongside our reviews of climate change and air quality chapters.
Our experience and skills across climate, carbon, materials and waste allow us to bring a holistic and balanced view to detailed but proportional assessments, and guidance and support for high level strategic and policy work and its implementation at the project level. We can work with clients to optimise the use of resources with minimal waste production, where circular economy principles are embedded to reduce the loss of valuable materials and carbon emissions across the lifecycle.