18th May 2017
With a hard Brexit now on the cards, we seem to be veering between bravado (releasing ourselves from “EU environmental diktats”, according to one quote) and talking ourselves into a blue funk over the prospect of losing the very bedrock of our sector’s foundational policies and modus operandi. The truth is that while the waste management sector relies overwhelmingly on
14th April 2017
This is the spring 201 legislation update, in which we look at a number of key pieces of legislation, government and industry news, and what it means for our customers. Industrial Strategy: Government green paper The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) is consulting on a green paper on the UK’s Industrial Strategy. Entitled Building our Industrial Strategy, the
4th September 2013
Of the materials that we discard in our bins every week, two in particular are of concern – food and glass. When landfilled, food waste decomposes to release greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. Defra’s delivery arm, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), runs programmes to reduce food waste (the Love Food Hate Waste campaign) and to divert
25th June 2013
The Local Government Association’s report Wealth from Waste has been received positively by commentators in both the public and private sectors, an indication that we could be approaching convergence on the outlines of a strategy to power the circular economy. Broadly, they involve introducing “push” levers to get more waste out of landfill (though the Local Government Association’s report is somewhat
17th April 2013
April 2013 opens a new chapter in the UK’s efforts to divert waste from landfill, with the end of the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS). The Scheme was introduced in 2005 and, in design, paralleled the market-based compliance scheme that applies to packaging waste – the Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) system. Schemes of this sort suited the UK’s “just enough
5th April 2013
With the announcement in the Chancellor’s Spring budget that the landfill tax escalator will remain unchanged at £8 per year, landfill tax will reach the Government’s ceiling of £80 per tonne of waste in 2014/15. No surprise here, though the lack of an announcement on the future level of the tax after 2014/15 comes as a disappointment. The Local Government
30th July 2012
The potential for green growth in the UK is significant as we transform from landfilling the majority of our waste to the more sustainable options of recycling and recovering energy from it. For this change to be realised, around £20 billion needs to be invested over the next ten years in modern technology and infrastructure. If we manage to achieve
