A report to the LGA's strategy committee says that the economic and operational drivers of European legislation as well as increasing waste generation and costs and the need to increase sustainability through material (resource) recovery and reuse, “will require larger business units than provided by most current waste collection and disposal authorities”.
And, the internal LGA report is also predicting that there will be an acceleration in the development of partnerships with the private sector “including joint economic ventures where long time scales and high costs will necessitate accommodations on the sharing of risk”.
This acceleration will occur partly because local authorities' role in waste resource management will become increasingly focused upon facilitating community planning and leadership together with increasing sustainability and quality of life.
Financial burden
On the financial front, the report, Local government's future role – waste management says that the financial burden of waste management on local government will increase substantially for several reasons including the need for large scale capital investment and the need to develop “large scale and international sustainable resource markets”.
All this, warns the document, will mean that councils will be “challenged” by the conflict between managing costs and meeting targets.
The report now goes to the strategy committee of the LGA which is preparing a major position statement about the work of councils in the future. This will be submitted to government and could influence future policy making.
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