WASTE MANAGEMENT
Government must get it right in its advice and support to the public sector
You’d think that with the public sector facing its biggest cuts in generations and the environment at breaking point, central government would be unwavering in its advice as how best to cut cash and save the planet, says Julian Kirby
that he has written to the Audit Commission - the independent watchdog for local government spending - directing it to stop advising councils that alternate weekly waste collections (AWCs) are more cost effective than weekly ones. That came hot on the heels of his announcement that pilot schemes allowing councils to charge or reward people in line with the waste they throw out had been scrapped. Whatever you thought of the outgoing policy you’d have to wonder what the new minister for decentralisation makes of all of this.
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So what is the problem with alternate weekly collection and are weekly collections really any better?
In Friends of the Earth’s view, the Audit Commission was quite right to advise in favour of AWCs. Around 160 of the 386 English local authorities operate fortnightly bin collections. The evidence is that not only are they usually cheaper but they also boost recycling rates, leading to further savings on the landfill tax and gate fees.
However, a number of other factors do need to be considered before AWCs get the go ahead. The frequency of refuse collections should only be reduced to fortnightly where a comprehensive recycling and composting scheme, including the collection of kitchen waste, has been established and the system has been well communicated. Alternate weekly waste collections can work well when local communities are involved in the decision and
40 pse
ou’d think so, but not so Mr Pickles who recently announced
understand the environmental benefits.
Are they unhygienic? With weekly food waste collections in securable containers there is no reason why they should be. And so long as the recycling and food waste bins allow for at least half the volume of waste the previous weekly residual bin took there should be no need to complain about reduced capacity.
We support AWCs in conjunction with quality recycling and food collections because they are vital tools in the sustainability tool box. Every year the UK burns or buries about £650 million of household recyclables – a scandalous figure that doesn’t even include precious “rare earth metals” used in electronic equipment. If that waste were recycled instead we’d save 19 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to taking six million cars off the road. In these difficult times, and with valuable materials such as those used to make phones and computers in ever shorter supply, this is economic madness.
It is also environmental madness to plunder fragile ecosystems for new materials with all too little effort given to recovering those same materials once they are used. Around 100 million tons of waste is generated from households, commerce and industry in the UK every year.
But the fundamental issue here is that, in these times more than any other, government must be dependable for the very best advice and support on how to ensure we tread lightly, and spend wisely. For waste, first and foremost that means looking at how we can cut back on
generating it in the first place.
One advantage of food waste collections is that people realise how much they are wasting and cut back on wasteful purchases, so not only is the waste collected but they create less of it in the first place. Another bonus is that 100 per cent renewable energy can be generated by anaerobic digestion of the food waste, a treatment that composts waste in the absence of oxygen providing a gas fuel for heat, electricity or transport.
We should massively expand services that enable the reuse of goods that are thrown away, particularly furniture. In the Flanders region of Belgium, they have 100 reuse shops providing jobs, landfill diversion and cheap goods and furniture to a population of six million people - that’s about one shop per 60,000 people. In the UK we average one reuse store per 150,000 people, with just one per 233,000 in London.
And we should also ensure the best quality recycling and the highest recycling rates, aiming for at least 70 per cent by 2020 and getting that quality through kerbside separation of recyclables as far as possible. That doesn’t mean lots of bins per household with families spending all day separating the recyclables as elements of the media like to make out. Instead householders can put their recyclables into one container and the bin men separate the waste into separate compartments, protecting the quality of the recycling streams and minimising the amount that is wasted through mutual contamination.
What we shouldn’t be doing is Nov/Dec 10
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