Calling the Waste Strategy 2000 “woefully inadequate”, the cross party group of MPs said the government failed to say what role incineration should play for waste while leaving the door open to a big expansion of large-scale incineration of household waste”. And the committee accused the majority of those involved with waste of “thinking without ambition and planning without ambition, of finding problems instead of solutions and aiming for short-term goals without a vision of the system of resource use and waste management which we should be striving for.”
For more information on the committee’s views which call for higher recycling targets see: RECYCLING
For more information on the committee’s views on energy from waste see: EfW
“Negative CBI”
The Confederation of British Industry is attacked for inertia and a negative attitude and the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme is dismissed by the committee as “an ineffective method of funding sustainable waste management”.
Taking a swipe at the waste management sector and local authorities the committee said: “The majority of those involved with waste in this country appear to be guilty of thinking without imagination and planning without ambition, of finding problems instead of solutions and aiming for short term goals without a vision of the system of resource use and waste management which we should be striving for.”
The committee, whose report “Delivering Sustainable Waste Management, was released at 11.30 today at a press conference at the House of Commons, said that “the failure to implement real and ambitious change in waste management is all the more disappointing since the government has had almost two full years between our previous report and the publication of the Waste Strategy 2000.”
Same excuses
Andrew Bennett MP, chairman of the environment sub-committee of the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee said: “At times this was a depressing inquiry to undertake. More often than not we heard the same excuses for limited progress or inaction that were trotted out the last time we looked at waste in 1998. In this report, we make many radical and important recommendations but it is difficult to be optimistic that they will be acted upon. Sorting out waste continues to be a low priority for this government and the Waste Strategy 2000 underlines this truth.”
The committee is seen as being rather cool in its view of the government's waste policy partly because many of its recommendations in its 1998 report were disregarded.
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