London Wider Waste Strategy - London - Greater London Authority

of the figures suggest that they may be of importance, although the data is
insufficiently detailed to allow any useful estimates to be made.
4.221. Phone consultations were undertaken with a variety of trade and business associations
in the commercial sector to try and define the some of the wastes classified as ‘general’
in other sources of information, and to obtain information about their views on waste
management and recycling which included the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and
British Hospitality Association (BHA). Neither of these organisations had or knew of
any waste studies relating to their particular sector and there were no plans to carry out
such studies.
Recommendation 29: It is recommended that discussions are held with relevant trade
associations to see to what extent their company members can be encouraged
to adopt sustainable waste management practices. It is suggested that contact
is made with London Remade to establish what means they have adopted to
recruit companies onto their Green Procurement Code. The next stage will
then be to contact the Trade Association Forum in order to determine a phased
strategy of initiating contact with trade associations directly. This could be
based on SIC codes.
4.222. Due to the difficulties of obtaining useful and up to date information, it should be
considered whether additional compositional surveys would provide useful information
to help develop a strategy. There is a danger that additional surveys would just provide
more numbers with a similar level of uncertainty.
Recommendation 30: It is recommended that a targeted programme of compositional
waste surveys should be carried out in those commercial sectors in London
where least information is available, particularly the wholesale and education
sectors. The aim of these surveys is to update and expand the ‘City of
Westminster Waste Analysis’ SWAP report of April 2001 such that this type of
information is available across the whole of London.
4.223. Despite the potential inaccuracies with the methodology used for this further analysis, it
is considered that this approach has shed more light on the composition of the
commercial waste streams. At this stage, it is recommended that the above figures are
used to provide an indication of the possible composition of the commercial waste
stream, rather than just referring to the SWMAL. Overall, our estimations suggest that
some 75% (i.e. 2.6 million tonnes) of the commercial waste stream is likely to be
potentially recyclable. Of the potential recyclables, 50% is estimated to be paper (1.3
million tonnes) and 20% cardboard (530,000 tonnes), 14% glass (370,000 tonnes), 11%
putrescible (284,000 tonnes) and 4% plastic (93,000 tonnes). It should be noted that
by far the largest proportion of plastic wastes are considered to be non-recyclable
(222,000 tonnes).
4.224. It has to be remembered that the above data is based on the SWMAL which is now more
than five years old. The LDA report, (London Development Agency, November 2003,
‘Understanding London’s Sectors’), forecast growth in terms of employee numbers for
the commercial sectors within London of 7%. It is difficult to predict the changes in
waste with regard to changes in employee numbers with a high degree of confidence,
due to differences in waste management practices within organisations, and hence this
has not been undertaken as part of this report. Instead, it is recommended to wait for
the completion of the Environment Agency’s waste production survey which is currently
being undertaken. Nevertheless, for the commercial sector, it is likely that the increased
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