We are way behind our EU partners, they are generating far more energy-from-waste, their recycling rates are higher and frankly they shame this country
Nick Herbert, shadow environment secretary
Speaking yesterday (October 6) at the Conservative Party conference 2009 in Manchester, shadow environment secretary Nick Herbert criticised the UK's current uptake of energy recovery methods to treat residual waste and called for a rethink on the way the country approached waste treatment.
Mr Herbert said: “We should see waste as an opportunity for energy with things like anaerobic digestion, we are way behind our EU partners, they are generating far more energy-from-waste, their recycling rates are higher and frankly they shame this country and we can, and will do, a whole lot better.”
Mr Herbert, who had focused his speech on issues of the rural economy, made the comments about treatment methods after shadow energy and climate change secretary Greg Clark had unveiled a Conservative pledge to provide incentives for bio-digestion facilities in towns and on farms.
Previous Conservative thinking on energy-from-waste has seen the party call on the government to adopt it as a “central pillar” of energy policy but, speaking in July, Mr Herbert also called for a wider incineration tax to prevent recyclable material from being used in energy generation (see letsrecycle.com story).
Incentives
In addition to addressing energy-from-waste, Mr Herbert also touched on the subject of household waste collections and praised the efforts of American rewards-based recycling scheme RecycleBank, which has proven a popular initiative among leading Conservatives.
He said: “We are sending far much waste to landfill which is extremely damaging and we have got to try and eliminate that as soon as possible – faster than the government intends. That won't happen, in my view, unless we actually step up recycling effort and that's why I think it's important that we have incentives for people to recycle and don't just rely on the regulatory stick.”
Mr Herbert said that the RecycleBank method of rewarding rather than taxing householders for the amount of material that they recycled was “much in line with Conservative thinking” and spoke highly of the trial of the system currently being carried out by the Royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (see letsrecycle.com story).
The shadow environment secretary also touched upon the issue of waste minimisation and called for the introduction of more voluntary agreements in the retail sector to limit waste generation.
He said: “We do have to start at the beginning and produce less waste in the future, not just through the regulatory framework but through relationships between companies to get a voluntary agreement to reduce packaging and the amount of waste, and so on, in the first place.”
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