Beckett allows Larac into waste summit

As exclusively revealed on letsrecycle.com yesterday, DEFRA had not found the organisation a seat at the crucial event. Meanwhile, precise details of where the summit is being held have not been disclosed for fear that it could attract the attention of anti-energy from waste protesters.

Organisations taking part in the event have submitted one page summaries of their ideas to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Among the latest summaries are those from the Environmental Services Association (ESA). And one waste industry expert, who has not been invited to attend, has handed letsrecycle.com his proposals for a new body, a Strategic Waste Authority, which he hopes will be raised by a key participant tomorrow.

Planning problems
The ESA has reiterated its view that to achieve government policy and sustainable waste management there needs to be an “enabling legal and regulatory framework.”
In the submission to DEFRA, chief executive Dirk Hazell says that the single over-riding legal obstacle is the planning system. “A site
identified in 2003, after the RTABs reported and with the Regional Planning Guidance process in place, might not clear the hurdles of the Structure plan, Waste local plan and planning application until 2013.”

Strategic Waste Authority

The idea of a Strategic Waste Authority has been developed by a “waste expert” who, while preferring to remain anonymous, says that he hopes his proposals will be considered at the summit.

He told letsrecycle: “Despite the publication of Waste Strategy 2000 in May last year, visible progress towards waste minimisation and recycling is very difficult to discern. Many people have expressed worries over the apparent inactivity – including the Secretary of State, Margaret Beckett.

“Clearly, someone in authority needs to take a decision to do something – but what? The waste industry finds it very difficult to make coherent decisions because all of the major companies are competing with and/or swallowing one another, as if there’s no tomorrow. Neither can the councils not voluntary sector do anything by themselves due to financial and legal restraints.”

He continued: “It is DEFRA’s business to create a suitable environment in which progress can be made and to facilitate others’ efforts in a co-ordinated manner. Clearly, DEFRA cannot do it itself – no department can focus exclusively on a target like this for the time necessary to achieve the objective.

“The industry needs a new, co-ordinating organisation that will put some oomph behind the widespread urge to get things moving. This could be called the Strategic Waste Authority with the aim of turning the waste strategy from a vision document into achieving an actual route map for achievement. The SWA would relieve DEFRA of the day-to-day responsibility for achieving the waste strategy because it can focus 100% on the job – which DEFRA can never do.”