According to the poll carried out by Sauce Consultancy, 85% of visitors to Futuresource believe it should be made compulsory for local authorities to calculate and publish the carbon footprint of their recycling and waste management services to ensure that recycling is carried out sustainably.
John Twitchen, Managing Director of Sauce Consultancy believes, ‘‘This issue is a sleeping giant, the industry needs to get ready for difficult questions about carbon footprinting. Of course, we recognise the difficulty in this but increasingly the public wants to know.”
The poll also looked at whether visitors felt that the media almost ruined the recycling industry with their biased reporting last year making residents feel that recycling was pointless. Only 43% blamed the media whilst 57% felt the industry needed to ‘get a grip’ which perhaps reflects the industry’s own self-image. Rosie Boycott picked up on this when presenting on ‘dispelling common myths’ at the Communications Hub on Thursday, commenting, “I think you have a really negative view of how you are doing. I think you are doing really well, the recycling message is getting through.”
When asked whether the recession has sparked the potential for a wider long-term social change in general attitudes to our ‘throw-away culture’, 67% of those polled felt that people are taking a long hard look at what consumerism means and 33% felt that people are just going for the cheapest short-term decision. In line with this, when asked if visitors found that inspiring behaviour change has become a greater challenge since the start of the recession, 66% said it’s even more important now than before and 34% said it’s further down the list for people.
130 visitors representing local authorities, the recycling and waste management industry and other interested parties took part in Sauce’s poll over the three days of Futuresource.