UK disposes of 650m worth of recyclables each year

Research carried out by the environmental campaign group entitled ‘Gone to waste: The valuable resources that European countries bury and burn' found that around 24 million tonnes of recyclable material was disposed of in 2008, a situation which the organization said could be remedied by landfill and incineration bans on recyclable material.

The organisation used information compiled by German consultancy Prognos to analyse waste arisings from commercial and industrial and municipal streams and calculated the monetary value using “conservative estimates” of pricing information for recyclables from trade media outlets.

In the study, Friends of the Earth claimed that not only could monetary savings be made by reducing the amount of recyclable material landfilled or incinerated but it would reduce dependence on imports, create jobs and lower carbon emissions.

Dr Michael Warhurst, senior resource use campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “It's time we recognised the real value of the materials we throw away every day. We only have one Earth and its resources are finite – making better use of them would save money and help tackle climate change.”

Despite the criticism leveled at the UK, the report concluded that the issue is affecting other nations as well. It states that “around half of all the key recyclable materials” generated in the EU are currently being sent to disposal and not to recycling, and Friends of the Earth called for moves to “severely restrict the dominant use of landfill”.

Bans

Friends of the Earth, in assessing ways of improving the situation, said it considered landfill and incineration bans on recyclable materials as “a valuable policy tool in driving recycling performance upward”.

The organisation pointed to places such as Flanders in Belgium – where introduction of material bans has helped increase recycling to 70%.

In the document, the organisation states: “Whilst landfill bans are not a measure alone that will drive forward recycling performance, they are a significant potential tool for policy makers across Europe, and further study is encouraged of those jurisdictions that have successfully implemented such measures and are reporting high recycling performance.”

In addition, Dr Warhurst said that more should be done to encourage recycling at a local level and called on the government to offer support to councils to invest in green initiatives.

He said: “The UK is woefully lagging behind much of Europe on recycling. Flanders in Belgium recycles over 70 per cent of its waste – that's twice as much as we recycle here. Our low recycling rate means that we have to import more expensive resources like aluminium – this is economic madness when they could be recycled here and sold for profit instead.”