We need to make more effort

Source : http://www.lgcplus.com/home/recyclingunited/we-need-to-make-more-effort/5010998.article

4 February 2010 | By Nick Herbert

 

Becoming more resource-efficient matters to us all. We send more waste to landfill than any other European Union country, dumping nearly 20 million tonnes of municipal rubbish.

Germany landfills less than 500,000 tonnes, an extraordinary difference in scale.

We are increasingly aware of the environmental damage that landfill causes through the production of methane, yet we remain dependent on this form of waste disposal. Why aren’t we performing better?

For too long, landfill was simply the easy and the cheap option, and the government was slow to respond to the challenges of the 1999 Landfill Directive.

Consumers have seen too few benefits from better waste disposal and instead see new facilities as a threat. Penalising households who have already been clobbered with higher council tax bills is bound to fail.

Landfill

The current government still plans to send a quarter of our household waste to landfill in 10 years’ time.

If we want to green our economy and make the most efficient use of our resources, we need to recognise that the present rate of progress is too slow.

I believe that, with the exception of residual inert waste from which materials and energy cannot be recovered, we should eliminate landfill altogether.

This is a challenging goal, but we can meet it with fiscal and other policy instruments. That’s why I’ve already made the commitment that a future Conservative government will put a floor under the 2013 level of landfill tax at £72 per tonne until 2020.

Floor

That is for a floor under the tax, not a ceiling.

To drive up recycling rates we need to think more creatively about how to reward consumers for doing the right thing and enable them to share in the value of the materials and energy that we can unlock from waste.

There is also a need to address commercial and industrial waste, which local authorities do not have to recycle.

Yet a lot of this waste could be recycled or have energy recovered from it, so the challenge is to find new and effective forms of local partnership and facilitate the market in alternative forms of waste disposal.

Nick Herbert, Conservative, shadow environment, food and rural affairs secretary.