Campaigners call for laws against burning and land filling valuable materials.
An article on the Guardian website reports that “at least £650 million ($1 billion/€825 million) worth” of valuable materials are thrown into landfills or burned each year in the UK, wasting natural resources and sparking campaigners to call on the government to impose waste ban laws.
With the cost of natural resources such as steel, wheat, rubber and “rare earth metals” continuing to rise as demand for consumer goods grows, a coalition of business groups and environmentalists have warned the government that discarding vast amounts of valuable materials could threaten UK productivity.
According to the campaigners, the UK government needs to develop an “urgent action plan to preserve valuable resources”, such as improving recycling schemes and banning reusable materials from going into landfills. They claim that tackling the issue in this way would “create thousands of jobs, boost the economy and protect the environment”
Furthermore, the campaigners warn that the current resource security action plan does “not go far enough”, and are calling for ministers to set up a new “’office of resource management’ to co-ordinate Whitehall action on tackling the resource crisis” as well as setting up a “task-force” for reviewing targets and recommending policies to increase the amount of recycling taking place in the country and ban recyclable materials from entering landfill.
The calls for action follow a survey conducted by manufacturers’ organisation EEF, which found that 80 percent of senior manufacturing executives thought that limited access to raw materials was already a business risk and a threat to growth. For one in three companies surveyed, it was considered the top risk for business.
Gareth Stace, Head of Climate and Environmental Policy, EEF, commented: “We live in an age where demand for resources is surging, with prices increasing and concerns about shortages mounting. While the current action plan was a step in the right direction, it currently falls short of meeting the challenges we will face where obtaining new resources will become more difficult and costly. Government must now step up its ambitions and produce a wider plan of action that deals with the challenges not just now but in the longer term. This is vital not just from an environmental perspective but to ensure the long term sustainable future for manufacturing and the wider economy.”
A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs commented that the government’s current resource security action plan includes “a new circular economy task force led by the Green Alliance to encourage better ways of keeping materials in supply chains, a competition to come up with new methods of re-using or recycling precious materials, and further work by Wrap (Waste and Resource Action Programme) to better understand the flow of critical materials in the economy.”
However, she added that the government is “working with businesses to strengthen [its] approach to protecting our economy against materials supply risks, and welcome the EEF’s contribution.”