You really wouldn’t know it, but the spending review is not the only important review going on in government at the moment.

The Green Alliance is also paying close attention to Defra’s review of waste policies. It was launched in July and the consultation process recently came to an end. Announcing the review, Defra minister Caroline Spelman said that there is an economic and environmental urgency to developing the right waste strategy and that, while the direction of travel of the last government was right, the pace was not. The review’s call for evidence asks how we can work towards a zero waste economy, where we drastically reduce the amount of waste created and valuable resources sent to landfill.

This is a big challenge that has also been preoccupying Green Alliance’s Designing Out Waste consortium. The first thing that is clear is that this isn’t just a challenge about the waste management industry or how frequently our bins are emptied, but about linear resource flows: work by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) suggests that of all the resources entering the UK economy, little more than one seventh are recovered. The other six-sevenths has to be dealt with as waste, whilst we extract more resources, depleting both finite and renewable resources and causing further environmental damage.

So zero waste can’t just be about moving valuable resources away from landfill, important though that is. To qualify as shorthand for the ambition of sustainable systems of production and consumption, zero waste needs to mean both zero avoidable waste and zero damaging waste, but also minimal loss of valuable materials to the economy, not just to landfill. Achieving this must entail designing out waste: focusing our attention much further upstream at the genesis of products and materials, and designing systems of production and consumption that will allow them to have least environmental impact throughout their lifecycles and to be recovered at the end of their life.

Importantly, this is not just an environmentalists’ charter but an agenda for which there is business backing and appetite. Consumer expectations that retailers and brands will green the products they offer as well as increasing awareness of material security considerations are just two of the pressures that are driving businesses to scrutinise the environmental impacts of their products and supply chains. But they are clear that there is a role for government in helping them towards greener, smarter products and services. We have fed the details of that role into the waste review process. It includes developing more effective policy to tackle commercial and industrial waste arisings, helping to meet the need for standardised and accessible data about the scale and nature of impacts, and providing leadership on future product standards. There is more detail in Green Alliance’s  recent report, A pathway to greener products.

Ultimately, the success of the waste review will not be judged on whether it quashes the tabloids’ obsession with bins, but on whether it recognises the overwhelming importance of finding far less damaging ways of using the earth’s resources, and sets us firmly on a path to achieving this.

Source: Green Alliance