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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to reduce the amount of non-recyclable shoes in landfill waste in England.

Textile waste was identified as a priority in the Resources and Waste Strategy and we outlined our proposals for dealing with it in Maximising Resources, Minimising Waste which was published in July.  Our current focus is on clothing and other flat textiles such as towels and bedding.  However, the Government is supportive of initiatives which promote keeping products in use for longer. We want to prolong the lives of the materials and goods that we use and move society away from the inefficient ‘linear’ economic model of ‘take, make, use, throw’.

Furthermore, we set an ambition in our Resources and Waste Strategy to send less than 10% of municipal waste to landfill by 2035. As a result of active diversion of municipal waste from landfill over the last two decades, only 8.1% of local authority collected waste was sent to landfill in 2021/22. This equates to a 90% reduction by weight since 2000/01 when 79% of municipal waste was sent to landfill.