Assessing waste management and illegal disposal in Northern Ireland

Created under the Environment Act 2021, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) is the environmental watchdog for England and Northern Ireland, tasked with holding the government and other public bodies to account. The body plays a crucial role in the UK’s post-Brexit environmental governance, including dealing with regulatory complexities in Northern Ireland.

Our Policy team started working with the OEP’s Northern Ireland team in 2023, not long after it was established. Our clients faced an uncertain and contentious post-Brexit legislative environment on the island of Ireland, and were tasked with holding to account a devolved Stormont government that was on hiatus due to political deadlock. Waste crime was a hot topic, thanks to a BBC podcast, Buried, on the illegal dumping of over a million tonnes of waste at the Mobuoy site, which sits next to the main water supply for Belfast.

As a starting point for the OEP’s work, they needed an evidence base on waste legislation and policies, as well as the situation on the ground regarding waste management and illegal disposal activities.

Objectives

We were commissioned to conduct a wide-ranging yet detailed study, covering:

The environmental and public health impacts of waste in Northern Ireland;

The legal duties, responsibilities, and powers of public authorities with regard to waste management and illegal disposal in Northern Ireland, including monitoring and reporting requirements, and targets;

Legal and illegal waste flows within Northern Ireland and across its boundaries, and the drivers of waste crime;

Best practice in waste management and illegal disposal.

Approach

We applied a range of research and analysis methods to conduct the baseline assessment. These included:

Two literature reviews

On the environmental and health impacts of waste, in general and in Northern Ireland specifically;

On the drivers of waste crime, with a focus on Northern Ireland but with reference to the UK more broadly.

A comprehensive regulatory and policy review

Creating a database of historic and current legislation on waste management and illegal disposal;

Highlighting legal requirements on public bodies to monitor, report and meet targets;

Outlining how legislation had evolved over time, often from EU directives, and explaining post-Brexit changes with input from leading experts on the topic;

Assessing performance against targets, by reviewing the latest official data.

Analysis of legal and illegal waste flows

Gathering district council-level data from WasteDataFlow and other publicly available sources;

Requesting data from Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA);

Gathering additional data and insights on illegal waste flows;

As data on illegal waste flows was limited, this research was supported by anonymous interviews with individuals from public and private sectors, as well as NGOs and academia;

Creating Sankey diagrams and GIS maps of domestic and transboundary waste flows.

A best practice review

As there is no single best practice case study which can demonstrate an ideal approach to waste management and illegal disposal, a number of examples were selected to highlight different potential solutions to the challenges faced in Northern Ireland.

Outcomes

Our final report and accompanying database of waste legislation were both delivered in November 2023, and were described by the client team as ‘a fantastic resource’. Since then, the OEP has been using these to inform its oversight of waste management in Northern Ireland, as well as its activities in relation to environmental protection more broadly.

For example, our evidence fed into the OEP’s recent ‘Report on the drivers and pressures affecting nature in Northern Ireland’, reported on by the BBC here. It was also used by the Northern Ireland Audit Office during the development of their complementary review of waste management in Northern Ireland.

Due to the high quality of work provided in the first phase, Resource Futures has been invited to conduct a follow-up tranche of research for the OEP.

The report is available for download here.