Members of the London Waste and Recycling Board have voiced concern over “losing time” in their attempts to improve the capital's recycling performance.
And, in an attempt to speed up its work the Board has agreed to complete a draft priority plan by mid- January 2009 so that this can be considered at its next full meeting on February 12.
£196 million in that ‘stock' sense is going to landfill and if we were losing that as a plc we would be asking some very serious questions of ourselves
Peter Calliafas, chairman, LWRB sub-committee
At the second meeting of the London Waste and Recycling Board, which was held yesterday (December 11) at City Hall, potential priorities for funding were outlined but a number of members expressed concern that the festive period could restrain progress.
Councillor Daniel Moylan, deputy leader of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and chairman of the London Councils transport and environment committee, said: “I suggest a step change of the way of working between now and February, to ask the policy board to continue working with [Greater London Authority] officers but make it the responsibility of the officers that the priority plan should be at a draft stage at least two weeks before the next meeting.”
Calls to hold an additional meeting to discuss the draft document between now and February were dismissed due to difficulties in getting councils involved before and over the Christmas period.
However, the Board's chairman, Mayor Boris Johnson, accepted the suggestion that a conference call in the third week of January could help continue the momentum of the capital's recycling scheme.
The Board, which was officially created in the summer to provide a strategic steer on waste management in London and held its first meeting in September (see letsrecycle.com story), plans to allocate £84 million to help build recycling infrastructure and increase recycling and composting performance in the capital by 2011.
Agenda
The chairman of the Board's policy subcommittee, Peter Calliafas, explained that the members had decided to treat the Board in a similar vein to a business enterprise and to use balance and assets sheets to explain what areas it intended to prioritise.
The main areas of priority highlighted in a presentation given by Mr Calliafas were waste minimisation, reuse then recycling, infrastructure and capacity building and the assessment of potential end markets.
Mr Calliafas – who was selected as an independent appointee to the Board by London Councils – said 20 million tonnes of waste being generated in London was currently being “written off” at a cost of £550 million in disposal costs, excluding collection and logistics costs.
Mr Calliafas said: “Currently £196 million in that ‘stock' sense is going to landfill and if we were losing that as a plc we would be asking some very serious questions of ourselves.”
“What we have started to do is delve down into that 20 million tonnes and spread out those individual material streams to understand the amount of material tonnage arising and identify how much gets sent to landfill needlessly,” he added.
Having identified that around 10 million tonnes of the waste could be diverted to recovery operations, Mr Calliafas said that more detailed analysis of this would be undertaken ahead of the Board's next meeting in February but the Board expressed alarm at the amount of material going to landfill.
The subcommittee chair explained that it would be important to assess private sector interest in the priorities of the Board ahead of the February meeting to “build momentum” and ensure that some “real horsepower could be put in” when the Board next meets.
Image
One area in which Mr Calliafas said progress could be made was in the image of waste for Londoners. Mayor Johnson agreed that it needed to be instilled within the city that recovered material was not actually waste but a resource. However, a suggestion to rechristen the Board the ‘London Resource Recovery Board' was not accepted as it would take primary legislation to make this change.
Despite the call for greater public awareness, Board members criticised the Recycle for London advertising campaign which had received £1.5 million from the Board when they met in September.
Councillor Colin Hall, deputy leader of the London Borough of Sutton and vice chairman of London Councils transport and environment committee, said: “I am disappointed by it frankly. The logo is very small in a corner and unnoticeable as it is the same shade of green as the border.”
Other members were critical of the delivery of the advertisements intended to encourage London residents to recycle, with Cllr Moylan calling for a robust assessment of its impact to determine whether it would be a worthwhile project to receive any further funding from the Board.
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