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

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they plan to establish separate mandatory food waste collections in England by 2025 as recommended by the National Infrastructure Commission in its National Infrastructure Assessment 2018, published in July; and if so, when.

The UK government has committed to work towards no food waste being sent to landfill by 2030 in its Clean Growth Strategy, published in October 2017. 113 local authorities out of 326 in England currently offer a separate food waste collection service and we encourage all local authorities to consider introducing separate food waste collection when opportunities arise to include these in collection contracts.

In the 25 Year Environment Plan, we committed to working to support an increase in the number of councils with separate food waste collections. We will outline our plans for this in our Resources and Waste Strategy, which will be published this autumn. This will include how we will fulfil our commitments to the circular economy package where bio-waste including food waste recycling must be offered for households.

We recognise the energy generation potential of food waste, when collected separately and sent to anaerobic digestion (AD), though we need to be conscious of some of the unintended consequences for air pollution that can arise.

We will consider the recommendations of the 2018 National Infrastructure Assessment in the development of the Resources and Waste Strategy.