How do you intend to tackle creating new streams to deal with waste? Are you leaning towards public-private partnership (PPP) projects?  

Not necessarily through PPPs. Everyone says that waste has a value. If I have something with a value, I can potentially develop a sustainable business model. PPPs are often created because the sustainability model is very elusive, and therefore there is a joint venture with government to try and get it off the ground. First and foremost, we want to uncover the value in the waste streams and try to consolidate and identify them in such a way that there could be a potential return for the people who treat it properly.

So you are trying to identify areas for private investment?

Yes, for those areas that can and should be. We are not trying to privatise anything that isn't privatised in models abroad. This is also moving in line with Europe's concept of a 'circular economy'.

It's called a circular economy because they were also looking at creating more wealth and jobs, which ideally sits well in the hands of private industry, especially when we talk about trying to create a secondary product. Here we would also be going into sales and marketing and all that.

What exactly do you mean by a 'secondary product'?

The circular economy is divided in two, biological cycles (food waste, biomass and others) and technological cycles (WEEE waste for example). With the biological cycles, Europe is even modifying existing directives so that you can treat biological waste and eventually create an organic fertiliser.

Chemical fertilising plants are not all that different to a chemical warfare plant. The only difference is mixing the chemicals differently. On the other hand, organic fertilisers are a totally safe concept and much healthier, because you are reusing waste that comes from biological nutrients not chemical.

 The Circular Economy concept means that if you can reuse biological waste after converting it into fertiliser or compost, then you are putting it back in the ground, thereby closing off the loop and not simply taking the energy out of it through anaerobic digestion.

Anaerobic digestion results in a gas which could be used to generate electricity, which is good, but the content left afterwards should be further used to create different products.

What are Malta's recycling statistics?

Malta currently recycles 12 per cent. There are EU targets for 2030 for 65% recycling, but the directive allows countries to delay by five years on condition that they see the country is making tangible efforts to reach it. In order to be granted this delay, the country would need to produce a plan up to 2030, showing that it would reach a certain level and that you would reach the goal by 2035.

 Building a waste to energy plant is not something you can do overnight. There are many studies that need to be conducted, and there is a lot of preparation. The plant itself would probably be built in two to three years, yet due to the studies and preparations required, the government is aiming for completion in 2023. Government now has a plan for 40 per cent of the waste thanks to this. Twelve per cent is the current recycling percentage, and so that adds up to 52 per cent of the waste. That leaves 48 per cent of the waste still pending. This is where this new agency comes in. What initiatives can be tangibly implemented to deal with this percentage?

Circularity is all about creating value, so if we fail to create value we won't be able to deal with it. This is where the challenge is, more so in a small economy. We need to identify whether we can consolidate certain waste streams together and see whether we create the necessary levels for a critical mass. Sometimes, what happens in a small country is that volumes would not be high to begin with and then the country would break it up further into smaller pieces and then nobody would be able to do anything sustainable.

Apart from the bottle refund scheme, what else do you have in mind?

Apart from talking about waste streams, even business models could result in a reduction in waste. As an example, let's look at the music industry. There was a time when people used to buy compact discs. Today, many people use Spotify. With one change in the business model the packaging waste disappeared, because now there is a digital system and there are different things that can be applied to that concept.

There is also the leasing concept. A bicycle leasing company, for example, is being used instead of buying a bike, using it once in a blue moon and then later throwing it away because it isn't needed any more. This concept is also being seen in PCs and - abroad - in white goods.

When you lease white goods, the retailer takes them back and can then either use them for parts or repair them and re-use them.  When manufacturers lease a product and eventually that product goes back to them, it is easier for them to place it back in the chain. If we can avoid something getting into the waste stream from the start, then that's the ideal situation.

We recently had a WEEE conference at which we had a presentation from an air conditioning company. It highlighted the many components that are sharable between different AC units, and the impact of the gases. We want to help them bring in regulations regarding the disposal of AC units, as just throwing them away is damaging to the environment due to gases, so we are talking about capturing the gas, etc.

The target is to recycle and reuse as much as possible so why go for a waste to energy incinerator?

Because, as much as I would like to move up to a 60 per cent recycling rate from where we are, that is a mammoth task. I really can't see us reaching it in such a short time. Remember, we have been recycling for the past 20 years and we've been investing in education on this for those 20 years. This is nothing new. We've now reached 12 per cent recycling. Really and truly, how will we reach 60 per cent in that timeframe? And even when we do, what will we do with the remaining 40 per cent?

The low recycling rate could be seen to as a 'mentality' issue. How can we tackle that?

Education is always a problem, because many people do understand what recycling is about. But we need to identify where in the process the failures lie. It's not a failure in one place, but in a number of places.  We need to understand and quantify each one and improve this failure rate.

We will always push everyone to improve recycling on an individual level. Maybe from our end we have not yet been able to transmit the message in terms of what people's efforts result in. Sometimes they just see a bag.

We also need to explain to people that, even when we recycle, we need to be careful not to compromise other material in the same bag.

This also depends on what the final treatment is capable of doing. If the plant cannot cope with the way we collect recyclables, then there are a certain number of rejects in the process. So there is a combination of problems.

The recovery of recycling waste is always growing slightly and we can make it grow much more. But we need to make sure that the losses between recovery and recycling are minimised. These are all issues we need to look at.

At the moment the agency is still in its infancy. The Ministry, Wasteserv and the ERA are all pushing the education aspect and I'm not saying that this is where we are weak, but it's not an area of priority at the moment. At the moment, we need to really start working to identify suitable waste streams.

I often hear from industry that they would like to invest but don't because government competes with their investment. Government doesn't want to compete with their investment: we want to understand what regulatory barriers there are for industry. For example, if I take my washing machine to a civic amenity site because it is no longer working, there could still be many parts that can be reused. The people who would use those parts are maintenance technicians, but they cannot just go into a CA site, as these are considered a waste operation.

These barriers were introduced for health and safety reasons and we need to see how, without compromising environmental and human health, we can reduce or modify those barriers to allow industry to work on re-manufacturing and re-using.