Isonomia

by Peter Jones

The Daily Mail ran an extraordinary story on its front page on 5^th April, claiming that 12m tons (sic.) of material collected as household recycling is in fact being landfilled overseas. The article also reports that official statistics showing a recycling rate of 43% of household waste are overstated because “in reality, processors reject most recyclable material, which then often ends up in landfill sites.”

Read more on The Daily Mail’s recycling “con” con…

by Peter Jones

The Budget last week offered little to excite the environmentally minded, as George Osborne produced no new green measures from his battered red box. One of the main talking points in the waste sector has been the absence of any clarification of what will happen to landfill tax after it reaches £80 in 2014/15. The Green Alliance advocates further increases, but the Environmental Services Association and various local authority representatives are looking for the escalator to stop. At the same time, the planned fuel escalator increase for September 2013 was cancelled.

Read more on A tale of two escalators…

by Peter Jones

Did you enjoy yourself this Christmas? I hope so – but isn’t it strange what enjoying ourselves means? For many of us, enjoying Christmas is all about consumption and excess. We buy and receive generous – even extravagant – gifts. We eat and drink far more than normal. We battle traffic, weather and hordes of other festive travellers, undertaking long journeys to see relations who we may not have visited for months. While we nurse our hangovers, overdrafts and carbon footprints, perhaps it is a good time to reflect on waste, excess and the possibility of doing something about it.

Read more on What kind of waster are you?…

By Emma Gowing and Peter Jones

Christmas wouldn’t be complete these days without an array of seasonal articles and blogs from environmental correspondents highlighting the enormous escalation in waste that our annual tendency to excess brings with it. There’s of course the 100 square kilometres of wrapping paper that will be thrown away, and the 50 million bin bags of food waste.

Read more on Jingle bins: the best Christmas recycling campaigns…

by Peter Jones

It’s hard to predict the exact outcome of the Campaign for Real Recycling’s (CRR) current judicial review of Defra’s latest attempt to transpose the revised Waste Framework Directive (rWFD) into UK law. The indications are that Defra is at last looking for a resolution to the great debate over whether commingled waste collection amounts to “separate collection” of the key recycling streams as required by the Directive, and perhaps this central point will be conceded.

Read more on The TEEPing point…