Conservative candidate Mr Johnson yesterday promised to champion “innovative schemes” that pay Londoners to recycle, as a central part of an environmental manifesto entitled “Protecting our Local Environment”.
Under the plans, he intends to promote work carried out by a company called RecycleBank which weighs how much material thousands of Americans recycle and rewards them in vouchers to be spent in local stores.
The money saved in waste disposal is then split between local authorities and RecycleBank.
Already, the approach has helped to increase the amount of waste recycled per household by an average of more than 200%, he claimed.
The measure was unveiled yesterday at a manifesto launch on Hampstead Heath, which was also attended by shadow environment minister Peter Ainsworth and Conservative green “champion” Zac Goldsmith.
Mr Johnson said: “Increasing recycling may appear to be a small gesture but it will actually improve the lives of thousands of Londoners. I want to work with London boroughs to make that a reality.”
He explained: “We will champion new and innovative schemes to improve recycling rates. For example, a successful new approach in the USA to pay people to recycle. A company called RecycleBank has expanded extremely rapidly in the last three years and now works in more than 200 American cities and towns. Their ground-breaking approach has been extremely successful.”
Mr Johnson revealed that conservative councils such as Westminster, Maidenhead and Windsor would talk to RecycleBank to implement the scheme in the UK.
If successful in the UK, Mr Johnson said he would promote it to all London boroughs.
He claimed that the scheme was effective in America because it rewarded people for recycling – rather than “taxing them for producing rubbish as the Labour government wants to do”.
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Increasing recycling may appear to be a small gesture but it will actually improve the lives of thousands of Londoners
Boris Johnson
With London “lagging behind” the rest of the country on recycling, the Conservative mayoral candidate also pledged that if elected he would work with the London Waste and Recycling Board – which was renounced by incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone after it was set up last year to help fund new recycling infrastructure (see letsrecycle.com story).
Mr Johnson said that rather than setting up a separate £24 million fund for infrastructure to manage commercial and industrial waste, as Ken had done, he would put the money into the overall LWRB pot.
With more than half of the restaurants in the country based in London, he also pledged that some of the funding would be used to manage food and organic waste more effectively.
And, he gave strong support to the development of Combined Heat and Power Plants.
He said: “CHP generators convert as much as 85% of the input energy into usable electricity and heat which is much more efficient than conventional generators, as well as emitting 20-40% less carbon dioxide.”
Ken Livingstone
On Wednesday, incumbent mayor Ken Livingstone hit out at Boris Johnson's “unconvincing green camouflage” as he laid out his own plans for waste in the capital.
In his environmental manifesto – entitled “Greener and Cleaner”- he pledged to continue to lobby the government for a London-wide waste disposal authority which he said was needed to change the way waste was managed in the capital.
Mr Livingstone said he would also use his powers to ensure that London councils improved “on their very poor record of identifying an delivering new waste facilities.”
And, he said he would continue to oppose new incineration plants in London in favour of “clean gasification and other technologies to create renewable energy”.
He said: “We could provide heat to up to a million London homes and save over a million tonnes of carbon emissions if we used clean, modern technologies to covert waste into energy rather than dumping or burning it.”
He added: “We will continue to work with the private sector to deliver major new recycling and reprocessing facilities, like London's first plastics recycling plant opening in 2008 thanks to support from the London Development Agency.”
Brian Paddick
Last month, Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Brian Paddick said that if he was elected as mayor, he would actively tackle recycling in flats, tackle excess packaging and drive repair and reuse (see letsrecycle.com story).
Mr Paddick will publish his full environmental manifesto shortly.
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