Squaring up for the Circular Economy
Waste and resource management is becoming ever more circular. A Green Edge conversation with the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM).
A conversation with the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) has been on The Green Edge’s To Do list for some time, but even more so after we read the short report Beyond Waste: Essential Skills for a Greener Tomorrow, published by CIWM in March 2023. The overarching theme is circularity and the report estimates that existing policy and the more sustainable use of resources will create over 74,200 new roles in the waste and resources sector by 2030; a figure set to rise to an aggregate of 240,000 new roles by 2040.
The report also included a superb graphic, accredited to the Environmental Services Agency, which we can’t resist grabbing and dropping in here.
Image: ESA. Click image for original web page.
So, given we’ve been meaning to chat to CIWM for ages, a chance email received recently from CIWM’s Professional Services Director, Katie Cockburn, was just the prod we needed to set up a call and find out a little more about CIWM, its championing of the Circular Economy (CE), and its work in the world of green skills.
Katie starts by telling us that CIWM is a global leader amongst professional bodies for people working in the waste and resource management sector. Supporting individuals to embrace new technologies and new practices, and to have successful careers in the wastes management sector is very much built into the Institute’s mission statement. Circularity is very much part of that and Katie says that at the forefront of CIWM’s thinking is how to move the world away from its traditional linear waste economy mindset. She says, “I think most would argue we're in a recycling economy now, but moving that one shift further into a circular economy has certainly been a focus for us in recent years”.
Sharing ideas, troubles and concerns to solve problems is important, and CIWM stages events and networking opportunities in its ten regional centres across the UK and Ireland, bringing its membership of more than 5,500 resource and waste professionals together to cultivate communities of practice. In addition to face-to-face events, there’s the CIWM Connect platform for members, which Katie says “…is fascinating because you can ask the weirdest, wildest, most wonderful question on there and someone will have come across the problem before and will either know the answer or help you along the way to get into the right answer”. Alongside these, CIWM has its Circular magazine for members and Circular Online for the rest of us.
Student readers of The Green Edge might like to note that CIWM offers free student membership – you don't have to be doing a waste-specific degree but if your degree touches on any areas around sustainability (which ones don’t, these days?) or you've got a specific interest, then Student CIWM membership gives you all the benefits of full membership except the printed magazine.
While we’re on the subject of students and education, Katie goes on to tell us that CIWM is now a regulated awarding organisation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a qualification portfolio spanning levels from 1 to 5. It’s also an end point assessment organisation, delivering end point assessments for apprenticeships in England and offering the qualifications that make up apprenticeships in Wales and Northern Ireland. Add to that an e-learning platform available to all (with discounts for members, of course), which delivers courses from micro 15-minute pieces to bespoke training programmes linked to accreditation of organisations that have developed their own ways to upskill their people. And all this is underpinned by CIWM’s competence framework…
…hang on Katie, this is interesting, tell us more about that…
“We've worked with professionals across the sector and we have a Skills for the Future working group who spent part of 2021 and the best part of 2022 building our competence framework. We had a framework of professional standards previously, so it was really about taking where we were, recognising the additional skills requirements that we knew were going to be coming up for our sector on the basis of Dr Adam Read's first report from his presidential year, and then also taking this new green skills research that we published in March, and making sure that our competence framework recognises all those additional skills that we know our sector is going to need in order to thrive and decarbonise and meet the needs of Net Zero.”
We ask what form the framework takes and whether it’s published. We hear it isn’t published externally – yet – but was created based on a review of several existing frameworks, including the one from the Institute of Leadership. We think we can probably make an educated guess about some of the other frameworks the team looked at. Katie tells us the current CIWM framework takes the form of a functional spreadsheet; we look forward to seeing it if and when it becomes fully publishable outside CIWM itself.
We recently posted on The Green Edge on the importance of a skills framework for the green economy and we observe that a skills framework for the waste and resource management sector must be an important part of that, as well as being something that’s developing quickly, given the uptake (we hope) of the Circular Economy. In reply, Katie tells us about CIWM’s Skills for the Future working group, which “is a group of dedicated volunteers who are passionate about green skills and skills for our sector, which we set up 2021 to keep a close eye on what our sector needs going forward in terms of skills. We’re always conscious that education lags behind industry - industry needs something and education comes along six years later with a solution, by which time industry has moved on. So, we're trying to ensure that we keep our finger on the pulse, understand the needs and be as flexible and adaptable as possible with our portfolio.
“We also recognise that our sector is not the most attractive for young people coming in. With all the research around new green jobs and skill sets, we know we're in competition with lots of other sectors.
“So, we need to work out how we celebrate what we do and almost shift the narrative into what we know to be a really exciting, technologically advanced, economically stable sector that we want people to come and work in”.
At policy level at least, competing in the green jobs arena might be aided by CIWM’s seat in the Green Jobs Delivery Group (GJDG), as facilitated and occupied by Dr Adam Read, CIWM’s immediate past president and currently Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer at SUEZ recycling and recovery. We look forward to hearing about what’s going in and around the GJDG sometime during the Spring in the first of the bi-annual updates from the GJDG’s co-Chair's, which we remember being promised in HM Gov’s response to the Skidmore Review1 of Net Zero.
Another area of increased exposure to the good workings of the CIWM might be this: as the Institute drives CE principles and practice higher up into the waste and resource management value chain – beyond recycling and into refurbishment, reuse and even repurposing, for example, as shown in the splendid Ellen Macarthur Foundation ‘Butterfly’ Diagram below – then perhaps CIWM is reaching beyond the waste and resource managers and into the waste producers themselves?
Katie concurs: “We have programmes designed for waste producers. We've got waste awareness programmes that give you that all round understanding of what's going to happen to products at the end of their life and therefore how you need to use them. I think there's been a bit of a paradigm shift across industry. We used to be almost the solo voice talking about Net Zero and sustainability and CE, looking for support from the higher echelons of organisations and sort of tinkering around the edges trying to solve some of the problems. Nowadays, it’s being discussed in boardrooms and there are teams of people across waste-producing businesses, not just waste management.”
That’s got to be good, right? Especially across the high-volume waste producing sectors like food, construction, retail and facilities management. So, we look forward to seeing plenty of people coming through the various education and training routes into the sector, gaining credentials en route like IfATE’s Level 2 Waste Resource Operative qualification.
But there’s a problem. Katie explains: “What we're finding is the Waste and Resource Operative apprenticeship, which is built specifically for our sector and delivers all of the knowledge, skills and behaviours we would want to see, is a really expensive one to deliver. We're seeing quite a large drop-off rate with a high percentage of people not making it to the endpoint assessment.
“Partly that's because it’s a significant financial commitment. The other side of it is that apprenticeships used to be qualification based - you used to work towards your vocational qualification, which was all around what you could do in the work, really practical and working towards your knowledge-based qualification, which in our sector was typically done by question-and-answer sessions and the building up of a of a portfolio. And this allowed people who might struggle with literacy and numeracy - or perhaps just struggle with exams - to demonstrate their competencies, knowledge and skills across a period of time.
“Now we have endpoint assessments, people may work for 18 months towards their apprenticeship and everything looks great in their portfolio, but when they attend their endpoint assessment they don't pass. And that's a really difficult thing; it's a long commitment for training for individuals who then struggle to meet the requirement and it's not to say that they're not necessarily competent. It's potentially that they're just not good at the style of assessment that requires them to do that on demand”.
IfATE and DfE, take note.
Incidentally, we did take the liberty of checking Katie against the numbers and find what she says be a fair reflection: the enrolments, starts and achievements for the L2 Waste Resource Operative since the standard was approved for delivery in November 2018 do look rather gloomy when compared to the proportions for all of the L2 standards. How the overall numbers look, we’ll leave our readers to judge for themselves:
Apprenticeships enrolments, starts and achievements in England, L2 Waste Resource Operative.
Apprenticeships enrolments, starts and achievements in England, all L2 standards. Both images: TGE with data from HM Gov.
Looking forward, though, we finish our conversation with Katie by asking what we might expect to see in the big CIWM picture over the next year or two and learn there’s a raft of things: progression in the implementation of the Institute’s strategy to lead the way to a world beyond waste; initiatives and events to influence good practice across the sector and to talk more frequently about the CE, most specifically its Festival of Circular Economy (FOCE) in November; continued engagement with key government departments; and more research papers to take the sector and everyone else forward into the circular economy.
In terms of education and training side, we can also expect more content for upskilling, both within and across sectors. Katie concludes, “I would like to think you'll see us collaborating more widely with other professional bodies and with employers and people who are waste producers rather than just waste managers.”
Our thanks to Katie Cockburn of CIWM for talking to The Green Edge for this post.
See response to Recommendation 59.