Higher recycling targets needed for N. Ireland

Speaking at a recent conference in Belfast Edwin Poots said: “If efforts were more focused on this area, we would not have to look at intervention further down the waste hierarchy​.”

Two councils in Northern Ireland are already close to achieving the 50% target, he said.

Commenting on the UK government’s Rethink Waste campaign launched in March, Poots said the initiative is cutting food waste by helping to bring about the cultural changes needed to make recycling and reducing waste part of everyday life.

The Rethink Waste campaign incorporates the Love Food Hate Waste project organized by government-funded Waste Resources Action Programme (WRAP).

New funding​

The minister pledged new funding next year to boost recycling rates. “Whilst nobody can, in the current financial climate, anticipate the availability of future funding in years to come, I will continue to do what I can to move us towards a time when nothing goes into landfill,”​ said Poots.

Meanwhile a Rethink Waste Fund of £5m has been offered to councils to provide capital grants to fund the costs of infrastructure projects.

Also available is a £240,000 revenue programme, - mainly in the community and voluntary sector - to fund waste prevention and recycling projects.

Poots outlined the need for higher recycling targets at WRAP’s Northern Ireland’s Annual Conference.

WRAP’s chief executive, Dr Liz Goodwin, told the conference that more than 126,000t of waste have been diverted from landfill and over 84,000t of CO2 emissions have been prevented in Northern Ireland over the past three years.

Waste prevention​

Setting out signposts for WRAP’s next business plan from April 2011, Goodwin said: “The clear message we have received from our stakeholders is that we need to engineer a significant shift up the waste hierarchy with more focus on waste prevention, better design and improved resource efficiency.​

“We need to start a real and honest dialogue about consumption and support innovations and behaviour changes which enable us to use fewer resources overall.”​

Preventing food waste and treating it with methods such as anaerobic digestion will remain important to WRAP as will diverting waste from landfill and the use of voluntary agreements, she added.

A spokesperson for Northern Ireland’s leading dairy, Dale Farm, said that his organization had turned environmental management from a perceived weakness to a commercial advantage.

Dale Farm achieves a 96 per cent recycling rate of its plastic bottles onsite at the Pennybridge dairy compared with just 36 per cent three years ago.

Dale Farm was the province’s first producer to sign up to WRAP’s Courtauld Commitment 2 and has now increased the amount of recycled content in its plastic bottles to 15 per cent.