Commenting after receiving a copy of the draft strategy, Samantha Heath, chair of the environment committee, said: “I am heartened by what I heard at the launch today. The Committee welcomes the publication of the Mayor’s Draft Waste Strategy and looks forward to conducting a thorough scrutiny of the document. We must ensure that the Strategy will support increased recycling across London.
It must also provide sufficient guidelines for London boroughs, the London Development Agency and recycling organisations so that they can work together in a productive way to reduce the amount of waste in London. In a bid to encourage wide debate on this issue we will host a stakeholders seminar on September 5 here at the GLA's offices in Romney House .”
Ms Heath promised that the environment committee “will do its best to provide a speedy response and will report to the Mayor in November”
In his draft strategy Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, says that “every person in Greater London currently creates almost half a tonne of municipal waste each year, and that figure could double by 2020 unless we start thinking twice about the way we deal with our rubbish.”
Mr Livingstone said: “I am delighted to launch the draft Municipal Waste Management Strategy for London. I am a keen recycler myself, but we all need to start thinking about how much waste we produce and what we do with it.”
The draft Municipal Waste Management Strategy, sent to the Assembly and Functional Bodies for consultation, puts forward a wide range of measures to tackle the problems of waste. It includes a comprehensive five year plan with new actions to increase recycling.
Currently only 46% of Londoners have the opportunity to use a kerbside collection service. Mr Livingstone is demanding that all Londoners should have convenient recycling by 2004.
London currently recycles or composts just 9% of its rubbish, a figure about 2% below the national average. The strategy is aiming to exceed the government targets, which require authorities to effectively double their recycling by 2003/4 and treble it by 2005/6. The Mayor believes the government should set higher targets for 2010 and 2015 and put in place legislation and other measures, which will ensure that these levels can be achieved.
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