Isonomia

by Sophie Crosswell and Harriet Parke

This week, Eunomia published issue 12 of its Residual Waste Infrastructure Review (RWIR). Each issue relies on us updating our database of waste treatment facilities, so that we can compare available treatment capacity with the amount of waste requiring treatment – but it also gives us the latest picture of who the big players are in the market.

Read more on Who’s building the UK’s residual waste infrastructure?…

by Matthew Homer

As the dust settles on the introduction of new recycling and waste collection days for 54,000 houses in the London Borough of Islington, I’d like to share with you some key lessons learnt, especially for anyone doing the same thing elsewhere and for those helping us to run our services better in the future.

Read more on A triumph of optimisation: re-routing Islington’s waste collections…

by George Cole

At home in the UK, I’m used to the council regularly collecting my household waste from the street outside my door. Missing a waste collection is a little inconvenient. You have to keep the waste until the next collection day, by which time you might have more waste than you can fit in your boxes and bins.

Read more on Waste to wealth in Uganda…

by Nick Stott and Peter Jones

It’s now a little over two years since the separate collection requirements under the amended Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 took effect. For waste collectors, this made it compulsory to ensure that, if they were collecting paper, metals, plastics or glass, they did so by way of separate collection – subject to the rather hard to interpret condition that separation is ‘necessary’ and ‘practicable’ (‘TEEP’).

Read more on Separate ways: a commercial waste case study…

by Chris Sherrington

What are people most likely to litter? This is a surprisingly tricky question to answer, as the data on litter is poor. However, if we want to have effective policies to reduce littering, it’s important to understand the behaviours we need to change, and the scale of the impact they could achieve.

Read more on What do Scots toss?…

by Peter Jones

Three-weekly residual waste collections are on the rise, but remain highly controversial. Their introduction has been heralded by stories of over-spilling bins, growing populations of rats, and people buying “top-up” collections from opportunist private bin companies – in fact, all of the same ill-founded fears that were raised about fortnightly collections.

Read more on What’s behind the rise in three-weekly rubbish collections?…

by Adam Baddeley and Rob Reid

Although heating accounts for almost 50% of UK total energy consumption, it remains strangely absent from the renewable energy debate. Former Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd brought it up last November, but only as a begrudging admission that slow progress was putting us way off track to meet 2020’s 15% Renewable Energy Directive (RED) target. Yet just a week later, Rudd’s ‘policy reset’ speech contained no major goals on renewable heat – instead, it signalled renewed support for gas to replace coal-fired electricity generation backed by streamlined regulatory and consenting requirements for hydraulic fracturing.

Read more on Turning up the heat on energy strategy…