Defra released a paper earlier this month responding to concerns local authorities raised in seminars on the LATS system over the summer. The concerns centred around whether or not non-household (trade) waste counted towards the landfill restrictions of LATS, which begin in April 2005 (see letsrecycle.com guide to LATS).
Under the terms of the Environmental Protection Act (EPA) 1990, councils have a duty to arrange for the collection of waste from the premises of certain businesses, including on-street retailers. For this service, they can recover costs from the business involved, but some local authorities have chosen to bring in a private collector to carry out the service.
In England, about 12% of municipal waste is made up of trade or non-household waste on average, with most councils seeing proportions between 5% and 20%. Some local authorities have extreme circumstances, with trade waste making up 93% of one urban council’s municipal waste and 64% for another.
Responsible
Defra has said that this material, which local authorities are responsible for under the Act, does count towards landfill allowances under LATS. And, it said that even councils that have handed their services over to private sector operators are still responsible for the material and so still have to count it towards the landfill allowances.
The paper stated: “the requirement to arrange collection when asked means that the authority is responsible for the waste even if it is collected by a private sector company. Therefore, commercial waste either collected by a waste collection authority or a private sector company on the authority’s behalf is municipal waste.”
Defra is also stressing that councils cannot reduce their LATS responsibility by “selling off” their trade waste services. It said: “A waste collection authority cannot evade its duty under the 1990 Act by selling off its existing collection services. Selling off an existing service is in substance no different from the waste collection authority arranging for the commercial waste to be collected by a private contractor.”
Nonsense
But local authorities have called this ruling is “absolute nonsense”, with others saying it resolves nothing – particularly where councils have sold off trade waste services already. The councils warned that there is often no certainty what is technically non-household municipal waste and what is fully commercial waste where it is collected by the private sector.
“It is crazy for commercial waste to be under two different payment regimes if it essentially the same stuff. One lot that’s under the local authority system even if it is collected by private collectors and one lot that’s collected by private collectors and has nothing to do with local authorities or LATS,” said one local authority expert.
“And how are we to tell which category that trade waste falls into, or how much waste is involved, just on the basis of a recommendation to use a certain private collector, which might have been made years ago?” he added.
Defra
One waste disposal authority officer told letsrecycle.com that he had been advised by Defra that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t count it towards LATS”. The officer said that if that was the case, councils with a challenge on their hands to meet their landfill allowances might start selling off their trade waste services, whatever Defra’s current paper said.
Defra officials believe that local authorities have a legal duty to report how much trade waste is arising even if they have sold off their services, but officials now accept that they will have to look into the issue of measuring the waste in more detail.
One potential complication could be that if trade waste now counts as municipal waste but wasn’t reported by councils in the 2001/02 arisings of municipal waste, the allocations of landfill allowances under LATS might have to be changed.
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