The London Assembly’s Environment Committee has joined calls for the next Mayor of London to standardise municipal waste collections, outlining it as a key measure in mitigating the city’s rapid growth.

In ‘Growing, growing, gone: Long-term sustainable growth for London’, the assembly identifies key challenges to accommodate London’s growth, with the city currently increasing by 100,000 every year and potentially facing a population of 13.4 million by 2050 (the equivalent of adding two cities the size of Manchester).

Without action, the report warns that the impacts of the city’s growth would put pressure on housing, workplaces and recreation while causing loss of green space and wildlife habitats, more rainfall runoff, extra waste generation, and more demand for water and energy.

Among its four recommendations, the report highlights the need for consistent domestic waste collections across the capital, stating that a circular economy should be put at the centre of London’s economic development strategy to shield the city from price rises and supply interruptions of globally scarce materials, while offering jobs and earning opportunities.

The report continues that waste management policy should be directed at the ‘most sustainable methods of dealing with waste, including reducing the amount of waste generated, reusing, repairing, remanufacturing and high-quality recycling’.

Promoting recycling, it says, would be easier with a ‘very large and consistent waste stream’, and so calls for the next Mayor of London to oversee the development of a route map to standardised municipal waste collections by all the city’s boroughs.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) and London Waste and Recycling Board have already announced that they are to collaborate on projects that will accelerate the circular economy with authorities from Amsterdam and Copenhagen, beginning with one to improve the capture of plastics. It is hoped the collaboration will spread to other projects, allowing each participating city to share information and experience of the development and delivery of circular economy action plans.

London ‘must end the futility’ of linear economy

Darren Johnson AM, Chair of the Assembly’s Environment Committee, wrote in the report’s foreword: ‘London’s population is set to grow by around 100,000 each year. At this rate by the middle of the century it may need to provide housing, workplaces, recreation, energy and water to accommodate 11 million, 12 million people or even more.

‘[A] key challenge is the failure of too many London boroughs in not providing separate food waste collection and their poor recycling records. This has resulted in London’s recycling rate flat-lining at 33 per cent and well short of the 2015 target of 45 per cent. The EU “circular economy” proposals have set a target of 65 per cent of municipal waste recycled by 2030.

‘The new Mayor must look at ways of keeping more of what we consume and produce in London, to utilise it better and waste less, in line with the waste hierachy [sic]. We must end the futility of spending money and labour extracting materials from the environment in order to then throw a large proportion away to landfill or incineration, or losing much of the value by mixing and breaking them down in bulk recycling. Moving to a circular economy offers a solution and needs to be embedded into the heart of London’s economic development strategy.’

The report’s other key recommendations for managing the pressures of London’s growth are:

• put long-term sustainability at the heart of all mayoral strategies;
• integrate water strategy across the areas of supply, demand, drainage and flood risk; and
• protect London’s green spaces and waterways and ensure London gets more environmental benefit out of its green and blue infrastructure through multifunctional usage, e.g. enhancing drainage and biodiversity.

Collection harmonisation in London

The London Assembly is an elected body of the GLA that scrutinises the Mayor of London and has the power to amend the mayor’s annual budget and reject strategies. The assembly’s Environment Committee examines environmental issues across London, with a particular focus on the mayor’s environmental strategies covering air quality, waste, biodiversity, noise, climate change and energy.

Its call on the next Mayor of London, who will take up office following an election in May, to take action on the harmonisation of waste collections in the capital comes just a week after the Green Alliance environmental think tank highlighted the need for a more consistent system.

The organisation’s ‘Greener London’ report stated that upcoming recycling targets would be ‘out of reach’ unless the different collection regimes and food waste collections were harmonised across the city. According to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), London currently recycles 33 per cent of its household waste.

The Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is currently leading a task force assessing the possibility of a harmonised collection system, with the aim of creating greater consistency in household waste and recycling collections in England. In a comment piece for Resource, WRAP Director Marcus Gover stated that a more harmonised collection system would benefit all stages of the supply chain.

Resources Minister Rory Stewart first declared his intentions to seek a solution to the confusion caused by variations in collection systems at last October’s Conservative Party Conference, when he referred to the ‘Berlin Walls’ on London streets caused by differing collection systems implemented in neighbouring boroughs.

The London Assembly’s ‘Growing, growing, gone: Long-term sustainable growth for London’ report can be downloaded from its website.