(Con): I accept that I am not completely up to date but, at
the time when I left as the MP for Thirsk and Malton, we were
selling quite a lot of waste to Holland and paying for it to be
transported there. It was waste from North Yorkshire and the City
of York, which, as my noble friend said, is the hardest waste to
get rid of because it is often timber, window frames and all the
itemised materials that he stated. It seemed a huge waste of
resource. One reason we did that was because the landfill sites
in North Yorkshire were already either full or about to become
full.
The reason we exported the waste to Holland was because there was
a ready market there for—what is the terminology? My noble friend
referred to incineration, which is, of course, a red rag to a
bull for many areas of Britain because they think of chimneys and
smoke coming out of them. In fact, I am a big proponent
of energy from
waste It seems to fall between two stools. My
understanding of the Energy Security Bill going through
Parliament at the moment is that the Government are looking
favourably on energy heat networks; perhaps the old-fashioned
term is energy from
waste . Why are we not recognising energy from
waste or energy heat networks as a form whereby we
create two streams: we dispose of waste that is difficult to get
rid of, as my noble friend said, and create an energy strand? Is
that something the Government would look favourably on?
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs () (Con): My noble friend
referred to energy from
waste and said that a lot of waste companies have
become energy companies. It must be said that this is still an
emitting activity but, obviously, it is much better for the waste
to go to that use than to landfill. Crucially, the waste
hierarchy ranks options for waste management from best to worst
in terms of environmental impacts and moving to a circular
economy. It is both a guide to sustainable waste management and a
legal requirement, enshrined in law through the Waste (England
and Wales) Regulations 2011. Priority goes to preventing the
creation of waste in the first place, followed by preparing waste
for reuse, recycling and then recovery. Disposal—in landfill, for
example—is regarded as the worst option.
Burning valuable resources loses them to the economy forever. For
example, although our reliance on landfill has fallen over time
to just 8% for all local authority-collected waste, our waste
from household recycling rates have stagnated at about 45%, as I
said earlier. This is because residual waste is simply being
diverted to energy from
waste Our target ensures that we get waste up the
waste hierarchy through reduce, reuse and recycle, and cuts the
amount of residual waste we produce....
