Kay Twitchen, who is also cabinet member for waste and recycling for Essex County Council, revealed her feelings on the subject to letsrecycle.com at the opening of a new civic amenity site on Canvey Island.
 Kay Twitchen, LGA Waste Executive chair |
Ms Twitchen, who is responsible for one of the most successful counties at recycling in England with CA sites reaching 60% recycling rates, said: “I won't ask Essex to sign up to the charter simply because I don't like the way it hands all local authority responsibilities over to the government. We need more money in the system, but we still want to be the ones to manage it. We're not short of the skills or the will to do it. It's mainly the money.”
The LGA chair's comments come just a few weeks after the Zero Waste Charter was launched outside Parliament by the Liberal Democrat MP Sue Doughty. The charter lays out a ten point system for communities, businesses and government, which includes landfill and incineration diversion targets of 50% by 2010, 75% by 2015 and 100% by 2020.
Unrealistic
As well as its plan to hand control of local waste management to central government, Ms Twitchen believes the charter's timescale is “unrealistic”, and that it has been written without using waste management terminology.
She said: “It talks about biological waste – well, what does that mean? It's not actually a recognised waste term – do they mean biodegradable, does it include food waste? You've got to be clear – if you're going to have a charter, it should be absolutely water-tight in terms of the language it uses.”
Although in principle, Ms Twitchen agreed with many of the ideas laid out by the Zero Waste Lobby – including retail firms designing out a lot of the waste from the way we live and the need for tough recycling targets – she said that a new, more carefully laid-out ten point plan would need to be produced for her to sign up.
“One of the opposition parties at the county council proposed the Zero Waste Charter,” she said, “and I said I wouldn't ask my council to sign up to it, but what I will do is bring them a ten point plan that I can ask them to sign up to. Those ten points have got to be made real.”
However, at least one district council in Ms Twitchen's county – Braintree – has already decided to go for Zero Waste, with another – Colchester – considering it (see letsrecycle.com story).
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