Green Party member urges higher recycling rates

The comments came at the Awards for Excellence in Waste Management and Recycling, organised by letsrecycle.com, which took place in London yesterday (May 1).

At the event, Councillor Johnson who is also a senior Green Party member, said the UK needed to work to push its recycling rate up, noting that its performance as a whole is plateauing with recycling rates in some areas even declining.

However he expressed concerns that many of the London boroughs would not meet the targets already in place. We therefore have little hope of London meeting its recycling target of exceeding 45% by 2015 so the pressure is still on and there is still work to do.

Discussing collection systems, Cllr Johnson called for more consistency across the services offered to residents.

He explained: What I so want to see, and this is a personal point, is better consistency of waste collection systems particularly here in London. I think one size fits all is not appropriate but I am not saying that we need 32 different systems in 32 different boroughs… I do think we need more consistency to make it easier for people to recycle.

Strategy

Discussing the Green Partys plans for waste management, he said there were three key themes: We have always pushed firstly for the highest recycling rate to match the best international standards…Second the adherence to the waste hierarchy.

Thirdly treating waste as a valuable resource and getting the best environmental and economic outputs so we need the best segregation of waste streams and resources at the kerbside.

While he did not give specific details on which materials should be separated he noted that this should include the separate collection of food waste for use in composting or anaerobic digestion.

On the topic of incineration he said energy-from-waste facilities do have a part to play in the UKs waste management strategy but explained that it was important that valuable recyclable material was not treated in this way. He advocated the use of advanced technologies to produce the energy such as gasification, anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis.

Europe

Also speaking at the event Steve Eminton, editor of letsrecycle.com, expressed concerns that environmental issues had slipped under the political radar. He said: There is a danger that a lack of UK political will currently may well mean slower growth in recycling and even a reduction in environmental protection.

Discussing the upcoming European elections Mr Eminton said he hoped to see new targets for recycling: Whatever we might think about the European Union, there are lessons we can learn from the continent.

“And, once the elections on May 22^nd are over, I think we should all be looking forward to new targets and proposals which will be issued by the European Commission. These new targets for recycling and better resource management should give added impetus to the work which you all do.