His view was that rising living standards in the developing world would mean the end of cheap imports as wage costs increased and home markets expanded – so perhaps there will be less “disposable” WEEE on the market to deal with. Like you, he thought that more appliances will be leased in the future, as companies become more keen to hang on to the valuable materials they contain. There would also be a greater amount of recyclability designed in to products.

He also took the view that there would be more home delivery of products, which would reduce the amount of packaging required – which cuts to the core of today’s recycling businesses’ work.

Finally – echoing some of your previous posts about who in Government is in charge of waste – he called for greater integration of different parts of Government to work on resource efficiency – at the moment Defra and BIS seem to have quite different agendas.