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Landfill sites have been the mainstay of UK waste disposal for decades, but space is now running out – and fast. The cost of landfill is rising and burying refuse is recognised as the most environmentally damaging disposal method. The UK creates almost 29M tonnes of municipal waste each year. And despite significant recent progress on recycling and energy recovery, 62% of this waste mountain is still buried in the ground. Encouragingly, the overall ‘waste arisings' figure – the measure for the physical amount of waste created – is falling relatively quickly, to the extent that government ministers have started to claim a ‘decoupling' of the historic link between economic growth and waste growth. But, waste disposal authorities still face an urgent crisis of investment and affordability as they race to move away from landfill – the disposal method they have relied on for so long. Landfill, although generally well-managed in the UK, is the worst environmental option for managing our waste. Ground water can become polluted, and the methane produced by landfills is a potent greenhouse gas – 21 times more so than carbon dioxide. Which is why the European Union has set tough targets for the reduction of biodegradable waste sent to landfill. These targets, to be met in the UK via the Landfill allowance trading scheme (LATS), mean waste disposal authorities must either keep within tight limits – permitted allowances – for landfilling biodegradable waste, or purchase permission to exceed the limits through buying extra permits from other authorities with allowances to spare. The limits decrease each year until 2020. LATS permits currently trade at about £20 a tonne, and they are expected to increase significantly as the target years approach. Ways to keep within the shrinking allowances include investing in waste-avoidance programmes or recycling schemes, and in technologies which recover value from waste. In fact, anything other than landfill. Either way, by buying permits or by investing in non-landfill solutions, more expenditure is required, and this is particularly hard to find in a climate of Gershon savings and competing calls on council tax spending. Alongside this, the Government's landfill tax escalator – designed to dis-incentivise landfilling by making it more and more expensive to carry out – hits disposal authorities hard. It will have its desired effect, which is to make alternatives to landfill relatively more financially attractive, and this is a good thing. But it still increases the burden on council budgets right now, at a time when we would rather be spending money building more sustainable waste-treatment infrastructure to deal with the waste we are no longer able to landfill. In addition, disposal authorities which still rely heavily on landfill – and this is most of them – face rising gate fees to cover increasing operational costs at the sites. Then there is the question of space. Available ‘voidspace' to bury waste is running out everywhere. The majority of landfill sites in the South East, for example, have less than seven years' life left in them at current rates of fill, while new sites are almost impossible to find and are unpopular with local people, for obvious reasons. Meanwhile, new facilities to replace landfill take time to develop, since the UK's planning system, although under review, remains complex and slow. Surrey CC has a plan to defuse this time bomb. It will invest heavily, together with its partners in the 11 boroughs and districts of Surrey, in an integrated, 20-year joint municipal waste-management strategy, which was consulted on and adopted in 2006. This includes concerted efforts to influence residents' consumption levels and the associated packaging waste, projects to reuse materials where possible, a raft of new recycling and composting schemes, plus associated infrastructure, and facilities for recovering energy from the waste that remains after high levels of recycling. We have collectively agreed an ambitious target to landfill no more than 16% of municipal waste by 2025. All this does not come cheap, but the cost of procrastination is much greater, both to the taxpayer and to our precious environment. Dave Ricketts is senior waste policy manager, Surrey CC

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CLIMATE CHANGE

Hole lot of sense

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