Anti-litter campaigning body Keep Britain Tidy (KBT) has today (4 March) launched its ‘first-ever discussion paper focusing on ending waste and managing resources within environmental limits’.

Following on from its merger with environmental charity Waste Watch in 2011, KBT is increasingly focusing on reducing waste and boosting resource efficiency.

In the report ‘No Time to Waste’, released today, KBT warns that global consumption of natural resources will almost treble by 2050, leading to ‘resource constraints’ and rising prices.

However, it suggests a series of actions that government, businesses and the public can do to ‘prevent waste and be more resourceful’.

Report details

The report outlines that resource constraints, ‘evidenced by the rising cost of essential raw materials and concerns over their availability’, as well as those regarding the environmental impacts of consumption, are ‘becoming a reality’.

Indeed, KBT warns that as there is increasing pressure to boost the UK’s economy through consumption, there is an increasing amount of waste being created.

The report reads: ‘The myth of abundance that underlies our western lifestyles, has locked us into an ‘iron cage of consumerism’– with far-reaching consequences for industrialised societies, for people

in developing nations and for our planet.’

It outlines that there are several areas that are the UK’s restricting resource efficiency:

• ‘Wastefulness remains the order of the day’:
Almost 15 million tonnes of food is thrown away in the UK every year;
• ‘Value within reuse is lost every day’:
Electrical items taken by the public to recycling sites would alternatively have a reuse value of approximately £220 million;
• ‘Recycling is flatlining’:
England is at risk of missing its legally-binding household recycling target of 50 per cent for 2020, as the annual rate of increase in recycling has been slowing to 0.2 per cent over the past three years; and
• ‘We are not measuring the right things’: For example, in England recycling is measured when it is collected and not when it is actually recycled.

Developing a ‘resource budget’ and introducing prevention targets

As such, KBT is calling on government, businesses and members of the public to work to prevent waste through a range of actions.

One such suggestion is to develop a ‘national resource budget’, in the lines of the UK’s carbon budget, to ‘help us live within our environmental means and takes account of the environmental impacts of our lifestyles that occur elsewhere in the world’.

Another is for the UK government to introduce ‘ambitious national waste reduction targets’, that KBT says could help ‘send a strong signal’ to the public and businesses that waste prevention should be their priority. It suggests that England could follow the Welsh Government’s lead by introducing a 1.2 per cent annual reduction target for household waste.

Other suggestions to make waste prevention ‘a priority’ include:

• setting a 70 per cent household recycling target for 2025;
• introducing landfill bans for recyclable materials;
• supporting the development of the infrastructure and the skills needed to repair, reuse and remanufacture goods to extend their life;
• investing in the ‘right mix’ of waste collection and management infrastructure to return ‘quality materials to the economy’;
• designing a system for measuring the use of resources that helps identify the ‘opportunities for waste prevention, better product and service design, reuse, repair and remanufacturing and doing more with less’; and
• reshaping society to show how ‘living more’, waste prevention and sustainable consumption are an integral part of, rather than opposite to, the ‘good life’.

KBT future work

The report goes on to outline that KBT will itself work on a range of activities to boost waste prevention education, including ‘identifying priority areas for action and better comprehend through market research what levers and approaches are necessary for change’.

It is also currently conducting a ‘recycling inquiry’, in partnership with SITA

UK, which calls on the public to suggest ideas of how urban recycling could be improved.

Speaking of the report, Phil Barton, Chief Executive of Keep Britain Tidy, said: “Whilst our reputation for litter is built on our belief that where we live matters, our passion to tackle wasteful behaviour is born of our belief that how we live matters even more.

“Clear evidence shows that we are living beyond our means on a planet, using resources we will never be able to replace. We, governments, businesses, and people urgently need to change our ways to stop being wasteful and shift as a nation to become resourceful. ‘No Time to Waste’ offers our first contribution as a charity to this debate and we welcome views and suggestions as our strategy to end waste develops.”

KBT’s report comes just one day after environmental think tank released its own report warning that ‘radically improving’ the efficiency of resource use and reuse is the ‘only reliable way’ the UK can protect the economy from resource ‘price shocks’ in future.

Read No Time to Waste or find out more about Green Alliance’s report.