The Government should restructure waste targets so councils can focus more on reducing waste from businesses, a parliamentary committee has recommended.

A report by the House of Lords science and technology committee said pressure had, so far, concentrated too much on households, which accounted for only 9% of the UK’s waste.

The report found that, while ‘responsibility for the recycling and collection of waste has been given to local authorities’, not all of them ‘meet the needs of businesses.’ It cited poor-quality recycled material, a lack of disposal facilities and a fragmented approach between local authorities as ‘hindering the attempts of those businesses which are trying to reduce their waste.’

One of the major issues highlighted was the ‘independent strategies’ developed by local authorities for waste disposal and collection, which made it ‘virtually impossible’ for national businesses to assess end-of-life consequences when selecting materials or developing production processes.

Programme director at the Local Government Association, Martin Wheatley, said local authorities faced a ‘disincentive to collect waste from businesses because any residuals they end up with are subject to the Landfill Allowance Scheme, unlike private contractors’.

The report found local authorities were ‘hampered by weight-based targets’, and a concentration on weight promoted the diversion of heavy material away from landfill, to the detriment of recycling light, valuable materials such as aluminium.

Dr Andrew Craig, principal policy officer at the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee, said local authorities would like to remove lightweight materials from the waste stream but they were ‘very expensive to collect’.

The committee recommended a more holistic approach to waste reduction and called on the Government to ‘restructure the waste targets and costs imposed on local authorities’.