Here, waste and recycling minister Dan Norris provides us with his exclusive response.
Our new campaign is asking the public to make changes further up the waste hierarchy
Dan Norris
Is Defra's ‘reduce, reuse, recycle' campaign necessary? That's the question letsrecycle.com is currently asking.
Recycling has increased dramatically over the last ten years, and is now a part of our everyday lives – in large part due to WRAP's ‘Recycle Now' campaign.
To complement and build on this, our new campaign is asking the public to make changes further up the waste hierarchy. The latest figures out this week show 27.3 million tonnes of municipal waste was created in 2008/09, the disposal of which is very costly and has significant negative effects on the environment and climate change.
Our new campaign is asking everyone to rethink their approach to waste. This means thinking about reusing or finding another home for things before it gets to the disposal or recycling stage. A large proportion of waste has a value to others, which I saw this October when I visited Preen in Bedfordshire. Preen take furniture and other goods that would have been thrown away, refurbish them, and then sell them or provide them to people who need them.
As letsrecycle readers know, we are all still creating unsustainable amounts of waste. 500,000 tonnes of household waste can be saved from landfill by people doing more to reuse it or find another home for it, an important contribution to the 'Act on CO2' campaign to reduce the impact of climate change. letsrecycle has an important role to play here and I hope that they will join us in encouraging people to reduce and reuse, as well as continuing to do their bit to recycle.
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