The government made the comments today in response to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (Efracom) report on the Waste Strategy for England 2007, which was published yesterday (January 19).
The Committee criticised what it described as the perceived “disproportionate focus” on domestic waste, which makes up 9% of the UK's waste stream (see letrsrecycle.com story).
In response, the government pointed to the policy statement it published in October 2009 which identified the need for a greater degree of convergence between C&I and household waste streams (see letsrecycle.com story).
A Defra statement responding to the Committee said: “We recognise that more needs to be done to tackle commercial and industrial waste and last October we set out our initial plans to do just this. Like household waste, reducing waste from businesses can't be done overnight – we want to see household, commercial and industrial waste of similar types being treated in the same way to save money and reduce waste to landfill.”
It also stated that, in the meantime, producers of C&I waste are still obligated to pay Landfill Tax and highlighted the work currently being done by the Waste & Resources Action Programme to cut the amount of construction waste going to landfill by half by 2020.
Proposals
Despite the critical nature of the report, Defra welcomed the majority of its findings and proposals, which included doing more work on tackling single-use carrier bags and introducing landfill bans for certain materials.
The spokeswoman said: “We are grateful to the Committee for their work on this report. We are pleased that they recognise the progress we have made on a range of waste issues such as household recycling, single-use carrier bags, and proposals to ban some materials from landfill. The report contains some interesting proposals which we will examine in detail and respond to in full in due course.”
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