Draft Business Waste Strategy PDF - london.gov.uk - Greater ...

Making waste work in London The Mayor’s Draft Business Waste Management Strategy Mayor of London 11
the next iteration of their reduction and reuse strategies. In making
waste management decisions, the waste hierarchy should be applied
in sequence from the top down.
Reduce
2.5 Waste reduction is at the top of the waste hierarchy. Avoiding
unnecessary waste, for example excessive packaging, reduces the
demand for raw materials, which would otherwise have been extracted.
Extracting and processing these raw materials uses energy and often
generates large quantities of production waste. Preventing waste
and minimising packaging reduces transportation needs and
associated impacts such as fuel consumption, congestion, noise
and air pollution. Waste prevention therefore significantly reduces
emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. The knock-on effect
of this saving is cumulative throughout the whole cycle, preventing
the emission of greenhouse gases and reducing economic costs.
2.6 There are a number of ways to prevent waste:
■ through commissioning and designing buildings, products
and packaging to prevent waste and enable disassembly for
reuse and recycling
■ through more efficient production processes
■ by managing procurement decisions to only buy what is required
and to specify recycled content and recyclable content materials
■ by changing behaviour to use resources productively.
Reuse
2.7 Reusing products and materials prevents the carbon within materials
from being released to the environment, reduces the pressure
on primary resources and lessens the impact from extraction and
transportation. An added benefit is that while recycled materials
are often shipped many miles from London for reprocessing, the
markets for reusable items are more likely to be within London.
Designing for reuse ensures that the whole product (or its component
parts) can be used again without requiring any processing. Reuse
activities can be as simple as reusing scrap paper or delivery crates,
passing furniture and electrical equipment on to another person or
business or disassembling and reconditioning equipment.
2.8 Although higher than recycling in the waste hierarchy, reuse is often
considered outside mainstream waste management, for a number of
reasons; waste management traditionally deals only with products at
the end of their life, reuse is often undertaken by different players from