Recycling

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My Lords, that is exactly what we wish to do. We wish to accelerate the consistency of what is recycled across England. Of course, we want to learn lessons from other countries where it has gone well, but we are clear that, for our environment and the world environment, we need to reuse and recycle very much more. Some local authorities have very high recycling rates while others have very low ones. We need to work on that because consistency is precisely what will be so important, along with increasing food waste collection.

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, while I welcome very much the Government reminding us that landfill has gone down substantially, the real risk in waste disposal is that energy from waste will very soon exceed recycling. When we build energy-from-waste units, should we not make it mandatory to have recycling centres at the front end of that process so that we burn less and recycle more?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

The noble Lord hits upon the waste hierarchy and the importance of reuse and recycling before considering incineration as an energy source—and of course landfill is a very last resort. That is why our ambition is to have zero waste in landfill, and why we all need to work on the circular economy and getting recycling rates much higher across the piece.