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 Joe Papineschi

There can have been few judgements in the administrative court more cut and dried than that given by Mr Justice Hickinbottom in Cardiff last month. In his decision regarding whether the revised Waste Framework Directive (rWFD) had been correctly transposed through the Waste (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2012, he saw little of merit in the case made by the claimants, a group of materials reprocessors. Finding in favour of Defra and the Welsh Government, he concluded:

Read more on Degrees of separation…

by Dominic Hogg

I had a bit of a shock the other day. I saw an aluminium can in one of our residual waste bins. You might think I’m being a little melodramatic, but in my view, that type of behaviour is not acceptable in a company of which I am the Chairman. It triggered an e-mail to fellow staff at Eunomia to highlight the fact that I was expecting rather more of them than this.

Read more on “No can do” isn’t good enough…

by Phillip Ward

Local authority recycling figures for England for the year 2011/12 have just come out from Defra. The good news is that for the first time more material is being recycled or composted than is sent to landfill. The bad news is the confirmation of what we have suspected for a while; the rate of growth in recycling is stalling.

Read more on Curious numbers…

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…