London Wider Waste Strategy - London - Greater London Authority

and education. Instead, reference was made to the Environment Agency’s Waste Benchmarking
tool which provides waste information on a sector by sector basis as described earlier in this
section. Whilst this data is not sufficiently detailed to allow an accurate estimation of waste
composition as for the sectors above, some insight can be gained. For both sectors, the Waste
Benchmarking tool suggests that, not surprisingly, paper and card, food, and plastics are
significant waste streams, as is wood for the wholesale sector. Sanitary wastes are not
insignificant quantities within adult and higher education.
It is acknowledged that the application of the SWAP report compositions to London as a whole
may not result in particularly accurate estimations. This is due to both the potential for
sampling error (as highlighted earlier in this section) as well as the fact that the SWAP report
was undertaken in Westminster and hence may not be applicable to London as a whole. Other
compositional surveys that we have accessed give significantly different figures for certain
categories; whilst these have been undertaken outside of London and are hence inapplicable,
they do demonstrate the danger of trying to apply one survey to a different situation.
Nevertheless, the estimates calculated in the above tables enable some conclusions and
recommendations to be drawn.
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