We saw in the Mini case (‘Action on the environment’) how governments at sub-nation a level sometimes act to tackle problems of ‘market failure’. The same is true at national, supranational and international levels, particularly over cross-border issues such as environmental pollution and degradation which invariably have no simple cause or solution (see also Chapter 17). When governmental proposals in areas such as this are being formulated, then thought needs to be given by the relevant authorities to how any new policies or laws will be implemented and the implications that such changes may bring for affected groups and individuals. Failure to consider the different dimensions of the implementation process can prove problematic (and frequently embarrassing) for government and/or for its citizens.
The problem of the United Kingdom’s ‘fridge mountain’ illustrates this issue very clearly. As a member of the European Union, the UK helped to shape a new EU regulation which outlawed the traditional method of dumping CFC foam from fridges and freezers into landfill sites because of the danger of it escaping into the atmosphere and causing further damage to the ozone layer. From 1 January 2002 when the new regulation came into effect, it became illegal to send unwanted fridges and freezers to giant metal crushers which prepared them prior to going to landfill. Instead they now have to be crushed in special closed units which capture the CFCs in liquid form so they can be burned and destroyed.
Believing that the new regulation applied only to industrial fridges and freezers, the Department of the Environment was slow to establish a system for dealing with the looming problem of discarded equipment. In particular the government’s failure to ensure that the special closed recycling units were in place when the regulation came into force meant that thousands of redundant fridges and freezers began to pile up in warehouses and hangars across the country (or were dumped illegally by the roadside) with no means of disposal. UK stores and suppliers of equipment had stopped taking away old models for free from November 2001 and consequently local authorities have had to be funded by central government to deal with the growing problem of storage until proper means of disposal can be arranged.
While this misreading of the regulations is by no means unique to the UK (e.g. only Germany, Holland and Sweden had new closed units in place by 1 January 2002), it has proved something of a cause célèbre in UK political circles and a task force has been set up to tackle the immediate problem of the country’s fridge mountain. Ultimately the plan is to send the discarded equipment to new recycling units which will be run by licensed entrepreneurs who are currently collecting and storing fridges from all over the country ready for when the new equipment arrives. Given the commercial opportunities arising from the new regulations, some observers feel that the supply side of the market for this service might ultimately become over-subscribed by the new breed of licensed operators, as has evidently happened in Holland. At the time of writing this is less of a concern for the government than the embarrassment of having no facilities in place to tackle the problem – a situation which might easily be repeated over the issue of scrap cars and waste electrical and electronic equipment when new recycling regulations come into force (see e.g. Guardian, 2 February 2002).