The UK produces over 300 million tonnes of waste every year, most of which still goes to landfill. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s recent report, Waste Reduction, recommended ways of reducing this amount of waste. Environmentalists, local authorities and the building industry give their verdicts.
 
Designing a good clean-up

Hannah Hislop and Julie Hill welcome the report

For too long our approach to waste has been ‘end of pipe’ – characterised by a lack of ambition, too few instruments to drive change and a focus on achieving least-cost compliance with European directives. We should be addressing how we can make long-term, upstream changes that instead address waste as a design flaw in our entire economic model.

The challenge of zero waste

Some countries, cities, regions and businesses have adopted zero waste goals in an attempt to dramatically boost recycling rates and bring greater focus to the importance of waste prevention. A completely zero waste society is probably physically and politically out of reach, but we are more interested in the concept as a rallying cry to declaring dumping our rubbish in holes in the ground a thing of the past.

We should certainly be aiming to do better across the whole of the economy, which was why we were very pleased that the report called on government to extend its efforts on waste reduction beyond the consumer and household waste, by putting more focus both on commercial and industrial waste and the conception and design of products.

Cradle to cradle and designing out waste

In their book Cradle to cradle: remaking the way we make things, American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart argue that human industry should be modelled on natural processes.

However, our products, materials and systems of consumption are not currently designed for such recovery and recycling. There are not enough economic incentives for this.

The environmental consequences of our extract-consume-discard economy have until very recently been ignored. This is why we fully support the report’s recommendations that the government investigate whether the VAT regime should be amended to introduce variable VAT rates that reflect a product’s environmental impacts. We were also delighted to see the committee endorsing the concept of individual producer responsibility, whereby a company has a direct financial incentive to design goods for ease of recycling and recovery.

Hannah Hislop and Julie Hill are at the Green Alliance