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"ZERO WASTE STRATEGIES, RECYCLING AND INCINERATION"

• Session: 2012-13
• Date tabled: 11.07.2012
• Primary sponsor: Horwood, Martin
• Sponsors:
  • Clarke, Tom
  • Gilbert, Stephen
  • Kawczynski, Daniel
  • Lucas, Caroline
  • Stuart, Graham

"That this House

• notes the European Parliament's adoption by a large majority, on 24 May 2012, of a resolution on a Resource Efficient Europe, which commits to working towards a zero waste strategy and the Parliament's call on the Commission to bring forward legislative proposals, by the end of 2014, to ban both landfill and the incineration of recyclable and compostable waste in Europe, by 2020;
• further notes growing evidence of incinerator overcapacity in the UK by 2015, which seriously risks harming recycling performance, as has already happened in some European countries;
• further notes UK figures showing a steady and significant decline in residual waste since the middle of the last decade - even allowing for the economic recession - and rising recycling rates;
• acknowledges the impact that these developments will have on the economic case for, and environmental sustainability of, mass-burn incinerators in the UK within a decade; and
• calls on the Secretaries of State for the Environment, Energy and Climate Change, and Communities and Local Government, and the Financial Secretary to the Treasury 
• to work together to examine how government policy can positively facilitate the pursuit of zero waste strategies, and
• to report to Parliament on their findings as a matter of urgency, as many local communities across the country are currently opposing their local waste authorities' costly, environmentally damaging and unsustainable plans to build mass-burn incineration plants."

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[We would add that 'mass-burn' is no more guilty than 'non-mass burn' incineration. See UKWIN.]