Organisations and individuals have until May 9 to respond to a new DEFRA (the UK’s Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs) consultation paper on future waste strategy in England,
One key proposal, likely to be controversial, but welcomed by environmental lobbying organisation on packaging Incpen, (the Industry Council for Packaging and the Environment) is to make greater use of incineration.
Launching the paper, Minister for Local Environment Quality Ben Bradshaw stressed the government’s current waste strategy needed a broader approach: “We’ve made some really positive progress since 2000; recycling and composting of household waste has doubled, nearly 50% of packaging waste is being recycled and less waste is being sent to landfill,” he said. “But there is more to do to achieve our aim of reducing our rising waste streams and burying less in landfill.”
Bradshaw said all stakeholders needed to put more effort into “producing less waste in the first place”, before considering how to make more use of the waste left, by reusing, recycling, composting or using it as a fuel.
In a clear reference to incineration, the paper identifies as a priority “making proper use of new investment to recover energy from waste as an alternative to landfill”.
Incpen director Jane Bickerstaffe says: “Incpen has consistently said that incineration with energy recovery is part of the solution. Our cleaner, greener European neighbours have long understood that energy from waste is sensible. Denmark incinerates 58% of its waste, compared with 9% in the UK.”
Other priorities identified in the paper include: lower targets for the amount of commercial and industrial waste landfilled; simplifying the regulatory regime and making it “more proportionate” through reforms to the permitting and exemption systems, better guidance and communication and more targeted risk-based enforcement, strengthened enforcement action to target “waste crimes” (from fly-tipping to illegal exports) and “developing a recycling culture”.
The consultation paper is available from the DEFRA website: www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/wastestratreview/index.htm.
