The requirement comes as the Waste and Emissions Trading Bill received its Royal Assent yesterday, aiming to cut municipal waste landfill rates and industry-wide greenhouse gas emissions.
The Bill introduces tradable allowances on the amount of biodegradable waste English local authorities can send to landfill. The scheme is designed to give local authorities maximum flexibility in reducing landfill rates in line with the UK's Landfill Directive obligations.
Waste disposal authorities will be able to trade their landfill allowances with other disposal authorities to find the most cost effective way of diverting waste from landfill. As well as trading allowances, they will also be able to “bank” unused allowances for later use or “borrow” allowances by bringing forward part of their future allocation.
- Click here for more information on how the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS) is likely to operate.
In order to improve the operation of the LATS, the WET Bill has introduced new measures to promote closer relationships between waste disposal authorities (WDAs) and waste collection authorities (WCAs) in England.
Strategies
In two-tier areas, often where county councils as WDAs are responsible for disposing of the waste collected by district councils (WCAs), the authorities will have until April 2005 to produce joint waste management strategies. Authorities already classed as “excellent” may be exempt from this requirement.
The WET Bill also introduces the power for a disposal authority to direct a collection authority to deliver their waste in a separated form for recycling or recovery. Any WDA that issues a direction to a WCA to deliver separated waste will be required to make a payment to cover resulting changes to the collection services.
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said it will consult on draft regulations and guidance for these measures in the New Year.
Welcoming the new Act, environment minister Elliot Morley said: “The Waste and Emissions Trading Act will help the UK to deliver on its commitments in both the Kyoto Protocol and the Landfill Directive. It takes an innovative approach using economic instruments to deliver economically optimal solutions, rather than the old tools of command and control.
“The Act provides the legislative framework for trading schemes that allow the required reductions to be made where it is most cost effective to do so, whether in biodegradable municipal waste going to landfill or in emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere,” he added.
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