Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she has taken steps to encourage local authorities to help businesses managing domestic seating waste containing persistent organic pollutants.

The Environment Agency are working to ensure that items of waste containing POPs are treated in a way that destroys the POPs content, thus eliminating the risk they pose to human health and the environment. Items of waste containing POPs cannot be landfilled, recycled, or prepared for reuse; the POP content must be incinerated to destroy the POPs.

The Environment Agency is working to bring local authorities and the waste sector into compliance with these requirements. Core guidance on how to comply with this legislation was published on GOV.UK when this legislation was introduced in 2016 and 2019. The Environment Agency and Defra have been working with stakeholders, including local authority representatives, from early 2021, to help them prepare to comply. This engagement will continue as the Environment Agency activity develops. Additional guidance on how to manage waste upholstered domestic seating has been in development with stakeholders since winter 2021. This was issued to local authorities and their contractors in August 2022 and published on GOV.UK on 19 December 2022. The Environment Agency will continue to maintain and update this guidance as needed.

The Government recognises that this is particularly challenging for some local authorities due to their geography and infrastructure. In December 2022 the Environment Agency published three Regulatory Positions (temporary conditional relaxations) designed to help local authorities manage their transition to compliance. Where there is local disruption to waste management services, the Environment Agency are rapidly engaging with local authorities and local waste operators to understand the barriers to compliance and how they can support resumed services.