Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

V I I Re-orienting UK waste
The political ‘crisis of transition’ has come later in Britain
than it has in much of Europe and North America. Until
the late 1990s waste was not a national political issue.
Britain’s geology and widespread mineral production
allowed a continual replenishment of landfill space. When
incinerator capacity contracted in the mid-1990s, landfill
was available to take up the slack. There was some local
opposition to new landfills, but this was fragmented and
lacked a national presence. The environmental movement
focussed on other issues such as road building and food,
and was in any case weakly represented in formal politics
because of the first past the post voting system.
There was, as a result, no strong internal pressure for
British waste policy to engage with the new resource
economy. While other EU countries have been
transforming waste into secondary materials at a level
unmatched since the Second World War, Britain remains
stuck in the bottom four of the EU municipal recycling
league and is in danger of missing out on the economic
potential of ‘closed loop industrialisation’.
In 1990 the UK household recycling rate was an estimated
2.5%. In line with the turn towards recycling, the
Government set a target rate of 25% by 2000. By the time
of the next White Paper in December 1995 (“Making
Waste Work”) the rate was estimated at 5%. The White
Paper was still confident, however, that the 25% target
could be achieved by 2000 and set a range of other targets
for particular materials.
The results are now in for the target year 2000.
Household recycling has risen to 10%, still at the foothills
of the S curve, and less than a quarter of the rates of
leading continental countries. Only Portugal, Greece and
Ireland in the EU have lower figures than the UK. If
Britain were an American state, it would find itself seventh
from bottom of the interstate recycling league.
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