1 REFUSE COLLECTION
"waste collection is […] the single
most important universal service that most households get and
pay for through their council tax."—Sally Keeble MP,
House of Commons, 24 May 2007.
1. On the face of it, few services provided by government
are more mundane than rubbish collection. Yet, as our inquiry
has demonstrated, few subjects fire wider and deeper interest
among both those who produce waste and those whose task it is
to collect and dispose of it. Since everyone has a dustbin that
needs to be emptied, everyone sees it as a fundamental local government
service: as one witness put it, "everybody is an authority
on refuse collection".[1]
2. There can be little doubt of the interest that
household waste collection generates. In the few months since
our inquiry was launched in March 2007, rubbish has been a significant
issue in May's local council elections across England, the focus
of a national newspaper campaign against perceived reductions
in collection frequency, and the subject of intense debates on
how and when it is collected, whether householders should be directly
charged for collection and what England can do to reduce its growing
torrent of used and/or discarded food, bottles, cans, newspapers,
nappies, clothes, electrical goods, and garden waste. In late
May, the Government sought to answer some of the questions raised
in its new Waste Strategy for England 2007, proposing financial
incentive schemes to encourage householders to cut, re-use or
control what they throw away.
3. We received around 60 written submissions and
examined directly the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management
(CIWM), the Local Government Association (LGA) and the Greater
London Authority, representatives of four individual collection
authorities, and Ministers from the Departments for Communities
and Local Government (DCLG) and for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs (DEFRA). In addition, 835 members of the public made their
views and experiences known following an appearance by our Chair
on the BBC Radio 4 "You and Yours" programme. We thank
Phillip Ward, Director for Waste Implementation Programmes, at
the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), for advising
us throughout our inquiry.
4. Our primary purpose has been to identify how the
ways in which local government collects household refuse can help
reduce the amount of waste we produce and, in particular, the
proportion sent to landfill. A little over 10 years ago, 84 per
cent of our municipal waste—the refuse councils collect
from homes and businesses, parks and street bins—went to
fill holes in the ground; a little over 10 years from now, at
present rates, there will, it is estimated, be no such holes left
to fill.[2] The past decade
has seen us slightly reduce the domestic waste we send to landfill,
while significantly increasing the proportion we recycle. In 1997,
just 7 per cent of English waste was recycled; last year, it was
around 27 per cent, and the Government intend that figure to reach
50 per cent by 2020.
5. Yet, the strength of reaction that rubbish inspires
may seem disproportionate to its true significance. Municipal
waste collection in England accounts for less than one tenth of
all waste: the rest comes from commerce, industry, mining, quarrying
and construction (in all of which sectors, it is fair to say,
recycling rates are higher than for municipal waste). Once the
commercial waste that some councils collects is removed from the
municipal total, the household component—what we put in
our domestic bins, bags and boxes—is only around 7 per cent
of the nation's waste. The efforts of the past decade may have
quadrupled the household refuse recycling rate, but it is rarely
pointed out that this equates to less than 2 per cent of the resources
in the nation's total annual waste stream.
6. There is a further disparity between the public
view of how we pay for waste collection and how it is actually
funded. Refuse collection is one of local government's most visible
services, and one of the few that is truly universal—unlike
even education or social services. As the former local government
Minister Sally Keeble MP noted in May's debate on the Government's
new Waste Strategy many people see it as "the single
most important universal service that most households get and
pay for through their council tax".[3]
In the public mind, it is generally assumed that household refuse
collection accounts for a substantial part of their annual or
monthly council tax bills. Mid-Beds Council, which collects from
54,000 households, is not alone in acknowledging that "most
residents regard the collection of waste and recycling to be the
principal service they receive".[4]
In fact, although the figure varies around the country, the average
annual cost of waste removal per council tax payer is estimated
at as little as £75—equivalent to around £1.45
a week.[5]
7. In spite of the comparatively small contribution
of household waste to the total and the perhaps surprisingly low
cost to the householder of collection and disposal, a strong emphasis
remains on diverting more household waste away from the traditional
option of landfill, long recognised to be the least environmentally
friendly disposal option. The desire to move up the "waste
hierarchy" was identified seven years ago in the Government's
Waste Strategy 2000 as the best way to deal with our ever-growing
waste. Landfill sits at the bottom of the hierarchy, with incineration—including
the recovery of energy from waste—just above. Recycling,
on which there has been undoubted progress, is merely the middle
option. The top two places are reserved for strategies aimed at
the re-use of resources beyond their primary use and, highest
of all, the reduction of waste.
8. Government policy over the coming decades will
continue to drive us away from burying our rubbish, attempting
instead to make us reduce waste, or re-use, recycle or compost
what we do produce. Two imperatives drive this shift: environmental
impact and money—on the one hand, "the potential to
increase England's stock of valuable resources and also to contribute
to energy policy" and on the other the need to avoid paying
fines estimated at more than £200 million if European Union
landfill diversion targets are not met by 2013.[6]
9. The primary principle underlying future policy
must, then, be to prevent waste rather than disposing of it once
we've made it, not least because of the knock-on benefits elsewhere:
each tonne of household product is estimated to use around 10
tonnes of other resources. How, then, can households contribute,
even if in a comparatively small way, not just to increasing the
amount of refuse recycled but to reducing the amount of rubbish
we all create in the first place?
1 Q 45 Back
2
House of Commons Library, Waste and Recycling Statistics; Library
Standard note, 27 March 2006, and Local Government Association,
Press release, 7 January 2007 Back
3
HC Deb, 24 May 2007, col. 1472 Back
4
RC 11, Mid-Beds District Council memorandum, printed in vol. II Back
5
National Audit Office, Reducing the reliance on landfill in
England, HC 1177, July 2006, p. 19 Back
6
DEFRA, Waste Strategy for England 2007, Cm 7086, p. 72 Back
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