In a speech at the Labour Party's annual conference in Brighton yesterday (September 28), Mr Benn said the UK should “stop sending” the materials to landfill as part of a wider effort to “value and use everything around us”.
We need to stop thinking of these things as rubbish, stop sending them to landfill, and start making the most of everything
Hilary Benn, secretary of state for the environment
“We're now recycling more than four times as much household waste than we did a decade ago. But we can do more. It doesn't make sense to dump thousands of tonnes of aluminium in landfill every year when someone will buy it and recycle it into new cans, using 90% less energy,” he said.
“It doesn't make sense that we throw away a third of the food we buy – costing us money and most of it ending up rotting in a tip, producing greenhouse gases – when instead we can turn it into clean renewable electricity to power our homes.
And, Mr Benn told the conference that there needed to be a change of attitude to ensure that materials such as aluminium and food waste were no longer seen as waste.
He said: “So we need to stop thinking of these things as rubbish, stop sending them to landfill, and start making the most of everything.”
Mr Benn has already mooted the possibility of landfill bans for aluminium and food waste (see letsrecycle.com story), and in the Packaging Strategy, which was published in June 2009, the government said it would look in more detail at material-specific landfill bans (see letsrecycle.com story).
Earlier this month, Defra-funded research was published examining the effect that landfill bans had had when they were introduced in other countries (see letsrecycle.com story), and the government has said it plans to consult on material-specific bans in the next few months.
Low carbon
In his speech, Mr Benn also called for action to develop “an economy that creates the low carbon jobs of the future”.
And, he told the conference that Britain faced a choice between “whether to leave people and landscapes to fend for themselves or to act together to seize this moment in human history and build the green society in which the low carbon will inherit.”
Subscribe for free