Changes and deadlines

As a leader in the field of sustainable waste management, SITA UK makes a continued effort to influence and lead opinion in the industry as well as among policy makers and the general public.

In line with our vision of living in a society where there no more waste, we believe that there are a number of changes required at each stage of the waste management process. For example:

• Source separation should be introduced for the commercial and industrial sectors to parallel the requirement placed on households under the Household Recycling Act 2003.

• Collection and logistics need to become more coordinated, particularly in urban areas and innovative collection and storage solutions need to be developed for urban monostreams.

• It is also important to encourage primary sorting to support product quality as well as quantity. Once waste has been processed, we must look at new ways of treating it, such as building energy recovery centres with combined heat and power facilities into new developments such as ecotowns and ecoparks.

• We must restrict the use of landfill by keeping landfill tax under review and introducing diversion targets for biowaste from the commercial and industrial sector.

• In product use and manufacture, it is also important to introduce a requirement for a minimum recycled content in selected products and extend ecolabelling to give visibility to products containing recycled materials. Businesses and the waste sector should also be rewarded for savings in greenhouse gas emissions when using recycled materials.