Councils with disposal responsibilities now face progressively tighter restrictions on the amount of biodegradable waste – including paper, food waste and garden waste – they send to landfill each year, up until 2020.
The LATS scheme is one of the principle ways in which the government hopes to meet the terms of Europe's Landfill Directive, which states that by 2010, the amount of biodegradable waste going to landfill must be 75% of the amount disposed in 1995. By 2013 this is reduced to 50% and by 2020 to 35%.
”The scheme will not only help to reduce waste the amount of waste going to landfill, but will encourage local authorities to promote waste minimisation and to use positive methods of waste management. “
– Elliot Morley
Current estimates suggest that around 68% of English municipal waste is biodegradable, and Defra believes this means reducing the amount of waste going to landfill to 11.2m tonnes in 2009/10 – a reduction of 9.7m tonnes from the amount landfilled in 2003/04.
Disposal authorities that exceed the limit set by the landfill allowances they hold will be fined 150 for every tonne they are over the limit, Defra has said. Councils have been preparing for months in a bid to avoid the fines, and many are now anxious to get started (see letsrecycle.com story).
Today, Environment Minister Elliot Morley welcomed the scheme, saying it will allow councils the most flexible way of reaching European landfill diversion targets.
Mr Morley said: “The Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme is an innovative and flexible approach which moves government away from the old tools of command and control by offering an alternative to the regulatory system of inflexible targets.
“The scheme will not only help to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, but will encourage local authorities to promote waste minimisation and to use positive methods of waste management such as reuse, composting, recycling and energy recovery,” he added.
Successful
The minister said the scheme is the first of its kind in the municipal waste sector, but insisted that trading schemes have “already been used successfully across the world in other sectors, most notably to reduce emissions to the atmosphere”.
The LATS system sets waste disposal authorities a certain amount of allowances for the amount of biodegradable waste they send to landfill each year up until 2020. If a council needs to landfill more material than it has allowances to cover in any year, it may be able to buy surplus allowances if another council landfills less material than its allowance allocation for the year.
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Further flexibility in the system comes from the ability for local authorities to save unused allowances for future years (“banking” allowances) or use a small proportion of future years' allocations in any one year (“borrowing” allowances).
Register
All trading – as well as banking an borrowing – of allowances is to be registered on the LATS Register, an online record system.
The Environment Agency will be regulating the LATS system, working closely with Defra, and the Agency's chief executive, Barbara Young, said: “The Environment Agency will be managing the trading register and checking how well local authorities are performing. We will also make sure we have clear, up-to-date information that local authorities can use to help them meet the tough targets as smoothly as possible.”
FoE
Environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth today warned that the LATS system will “simply see waste being burnt rather than buried”. FoE senior waste campaigner Claire Wilton said: “We urgently need to drive waste away from landfill, but not into the arms of incinerator operators.
“The public wants to recycle, not burn rubbish. The government must remove the financial incentive to incinerate rubbish and introduce higher national recycling targets,” Ms Wilton added.
Friends of the Earth said that eight councils in England will be permitted to landfill more in 2020 than they do today, because they currently incinerate their waste. These include Coventry, Dudley, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton councils as well as the London borough of Lewisham.
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