Environment Minister criticised over suggesting tougher recycling targets

Stephen Jenkinson made the comments in a change to his planned speech in response to Environment Minister Michael Meacher, who had spoken earlier to endorse the “Race to Recycle” event, held in Manchester's Lowry Hotel on Friday.

Before giving awards to the region's high-performing local authorities, Mr Meacher had stated that recycling targets might not be tough enough, and in discussing the difficulties faced by the industry, he claimed WRAP as a solution.

Mr Jenkinson scrapped his original speech in order to make it clear that with the current circumstances, the achievements of the region's waste management partnerships had been no easy matter. He said: “Not only is there the recycling targets, there's the landfill directive, and all these challenges together mean that we have to form partnerships, not one single entity can do it.”

After accepting an award for recycling 100,000 tonnes of Greater Manchester's paper through Shotton Paper, Stephen Jenkinson also noted that WRAP still has a lot of work to do to ensure that there will be a market for the material produced by the planned increase in recycling.

He said: “The Greater Manchester area, having 1.4 million tonnes from 500 square miles, were it to recycle 25%, needs a market for 350,000 tonnes. Where WRAP's challenge is already starting is to make sure there's a marketplace for that amount of material.”

Campaign

The GMW managing director was speaking at the launch of the Race to Recycle event, which has been set up by the Shotton Paper Company to encourage the recycling of newspapers and magazines in Manchester. Each year, an award -equivalent to 1 for every tonne of paper sent to Shotton for recycling – will be awarded to the three most improved local authorities in the Greater Manchester area.

Commenting about the campaign after its launch, the managing director of Shotton's parent company UPM-Kymmene, Martin Gale, said: “It's fundamental to Manchester achieving its recycling targets. As we know, newspapers and magazines form the majority share of the volume of the recyclate in household waste, so any scheme that really puts an open door, the sky's the limit on the volume that can come out.”

Next year, Shotton expects to hand out awards totalling around 40,000 to be spent by the chosen councils on projects that deliver environmental or social benefit to their local communities.

Mr Gale said: “We're going to want to come back every year, handing over these checks for money that represents the recycling volumes that have come out of Greater Manchester and flown through the reprocessing at Shotton, and it gives me no greater pleasure to present a bigger check than I'm budgeting for.”

Left to right: Stephen Jenkinson of Greater Manchester Waste Ltd, Martin Gale, MD of UPM-Kymmene UK Ltd, Rt Hon Michael Meacher MP and Paul Horrocks of the Manchester Evening News unveil one of the 800 paper banks that will be distributed throughout the Greater Manchester area in support of Race to Recycle