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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to (a) reduce waste to landfill and (b) increase waste to recycling.

The Government is committed to increasing both the quantity and quality of waste materials that are recycled and reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill.

The Waste Infrastructure Delivery Programme was established to provide support to local authorities to help accelerate the building of infrastructure needed to treat residual waste and increase recycling, minimising waste going to landfill to help meet our landfill diversion targets, which we reached in 2013.

One of the proposals in our recent consultation ‘Consistency in household and business recycling collections in England’ was for all collectors of waste to collect a core set of materials from households and businesses. We believe that this will improve the opportunity for householders to increase what they can recycle.

We are analysing the responses to the consultation and will publish the Government’s response to it shortly.