50% recycling target required for 2010, recommends report to government

The committee added that the Best Value regime – which applies to local authority tendering – must work to increase the proportion of households covered by kerbside collections.

The committee, whose recommendations come in the report, Delivering sustainable waste management (see also Committee Report), said that a pre requisite of an authority being awarded beacon council status should be that at least 50% of its households should be covered by kerbside collections.

The MPs, from all parties, recommend that the Local Government Associations develops a best practice guide for councils wanting to introduce or improve kerbside collections.

While the government consider the recycling targets it has set as challenging, the MPs take a different view. It says that the national targets for recycling and composting give a real challenge for 2005 but the targets for 2010 (30%) and 2015 (33%) are “depressingly unambitious and appear implicitly to accept that there is a ceiling on the proportion which can be recycled”.

The report says that these later targets fail to build on the significant efforts which will be required to meet the 2005 target and could result in a loss of momentum in recycling.
The MPs recommend that new targets are set at 50% by 2010 and 60% by 2015 to ensure that vigorous efforts to recycle are maintained.”

Markets
The report says that the problem of finding adequate and stable markets for recycled materials is a well-documented one but the MPs have agreed generally with the view of the Community Recycling Network that problems in finding markets for materials is a myth.

The MPs refer to evidence from the Recycling Consortium in Bristol which said: “We struggled for 20 years plus with the idea that recycling should pay for itself. We do not expect landfill sites to pay for themselves. We quite accept that, with landfill sites, if the standards increase it becomes expensive. We do not say to the landfill operators, I am very sorry but you will have to find that money from somewhere else.”

The MPs say the arguments that markets can be hard to find is no argument against the broad strategy to expand recycling. However, it does concede there can be problems but says that it is encouraged that the Waste and Resources Action Programme is planning to tackle this area. And the committee emphasises that public procurement with greater specification of recycled materials could help provide a big boost for markets of products with high proportions of recycled materials.