Household Waste
April 30th, 2010
Waste Disposal
UKIP’s policy on waste is, as in all things we do, based on efficient and prudential use of resources.
As always we start from the facts. For any artefact there are four possible outcomes (Table 1): (1) recycle, (2) convert to energy/electricity, (3) incinerate to atmosphere,(4) disposal in landfill.
1 RECYCLING:
We follow the 3 R’s precept to:
(i) reduce primary use where possible by good design (e.g. of packaging)
(ii) reuse either directly (non-food only) or by simple adaptation (e.g. pipework)
(iii) reprocess plastics can often be compacted, melted and formed into other lower grade uses such as fencing and board without costly energy intensive cleaning.
Having said this, there will always be an irreducible minimum where other means of disposal are required. The three remaining options are:
2 Energy from waste (principally incineration or bio-digestion into space heating)
3 Incineration to atmosphere
4 Landfill
In line with our fundamental efficient and prudential principle, UKIP strongly favours option 2. Here as in so many matters of production and conservation Switzerland sets the bench-mark for the rest of the world. Referring to household waste (around 460 kg per person in the UK) some international comparisons for 2002 (latest available) are:
Table 1: Waste disposal by countries and type of disposal
| % of Household Waste | ||||
| Country | UK | USA | Netherlands | Switzerland |
| Type of disposal[1] | ||||
| 1 Recycle | 10 | 25 | 25 | 39 |
| 2 Energy from waste | 1? | 1? | 45 | 46 |
| 3 Incineration to atmosphere | 10 | 14 | 5 | |
| 4 Landfill | 79 | 60 | 30 | 10 |
As can be seen the UK is enormously behind in making some use of waste – behind even the USA with 60 times the area of England. This is the consequence of 50 years of gross mismanagement and neglect by the Labour and Conservative governments.
Our policy is to promote by all possible means, using our Production Enterprise Centres, but not confined to them:
(a) redesign-for-reuse products [options 1(i) and also 1(ii) and 1(iii)]
(b) direct-from-householder-to-user collection systems (options for 2 and 3)
(c) compaction systems for plastics, paper and board to provide fuel brickets for electric generators and local heating systems (option 2), including dual fuel systems for remote localities.
[1] Source CERNO 2002