Alan Whitehead

Labour Party | Southampton Test

WHITEHEAD’S WEMBLEY WASTE SPEECH

Dr Alan Whitehead, MP for Southampton Test visited the new Wembley Stadium this week – but not to show off his goalkeeping skills. Instead Dr Whitehead used the opportunity to discuss the challenge of changing the mindset around waste – to make recycling a part of daily life, and to utilise biodegradable waste as an energy source.

Dr Whitehead was speaking to the Disposal Services Agency’s Sustainable Solutions Roadshow as Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Sustainable Resources Group. He covered a number of issues ranging from the need to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill, the new regulations on the disposal of waste electrical and electronic goods, to the potential of turning waste into biogas.

In his speech Dr Whitehead said:

“The challenge for both municipal and commercial waste disposal authorities and companies is subtly changed - how can we get whatever households and industry throws out, out of their bins into trucks and into new forms of resource as quickly efficiently and as cheaply as possible.”

“But of course there is a new and still in parts unfamiliar challenge to householders and industry: the waste industry will take it away but you have got to stop as far as possible putting it there in the first place.”

Dr Whitehead went on to report the good news that recycling and composting of household waste has quadrupled in the last ten years, and that as a country, we’re recycling twice as much packaging waste as we did ten years ago, and have reduced the amount of waste going into landfill by 20% in the municipal sector, and by 14% in the commercial and industrial sector.

However, Dr Whitehead also warned that further progress is still necessary and imperative. For example, the targets for  reduction in biodegradable waste in landfill for example that  require us to reduce the proportion of waste arising  to 75% of 1995 levels by 2010, 505 by 2013, and 35% by 2020 – a challenge compounded by the fact that waste arising from municipal and business is still growing, albeit slowly.

Dr Whitehead added:

“The challenge is constructing the range of facilities that will deal with this very different way of dealing with waste will supersede old style incineration - and how to get the public, if not to love them, at least to accept that they are a necessary part of daily life, and are not some dreadful imposition designed to annoy them.”

He concluded:

“But in the end it is all of a piece - if you believe that you can throw anything you like way and that so long as you pay your way, someone will take it away - a long way away and deal with it for you, then you will not see the connection between you and the anaerobic digester that someone is proposing to build in your neighbourhood.  The challenge - of cementing that connection - of making recycling and all that goes with it a part of life remains to be won, but it has to, and it has to soon.”