Recycling targets are in the bag

18 October 2006

Councils have exceeded the Government’s target to recycle and compost 25% of household waste by 2005/06, but a leading think-tank has called for more action on changing attitudes to waste creation.
Provisional figures from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) show households in England recycled 27% of their waste during 2005/06, up 4% from the previous year.
The East Midlands produced the best results, with 33% of households recycling their waste during 2005/06, up 6% on the previous year. The only other region to register a similar improvement was the Northeast, but only 22% of households in this region recycled over the year. London scored worst, with 21%, up just 3% on last year.
Ben Bradshaw, local environment quality minister, said recycling had almost quadrupled since 1997, but warned of ‘an unacceptably big gap between the best and worst performers’.
The DEFRA figures also showed all waste disposal authorities in England have successfully met their limits for the first year of the Landfill Allowances Trading Scheme (LATS), introduced in April 2005 to reduce the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill.
LATS will see progressive reductions in the amount of biodegradable municipal waste which disposable authorities can landfill, until the amount is reduced to 35% of 1995’s figure by 2020.
Lee Marshall, chair of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC), said he shared the optimism conveyed in the report, which ‘shows what local authorities can do, when given the initiative’. Nevertheless, reaching LATS targets over coming years would be tough, and much depended on the implementation of new infrastructure, he added.
However, the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) warned that the Government must do more to change attitudes in order to curb waste creation. He said: ‘While councils should be congratulated for doing as much as they can to increase recycling, the waste burden will continue to grow until we see a significant shift in attitudes from those who create waste in the first place.’

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