Ben Elliot of Quintessentially Group has been appointed the UK’s first Food Surplus and Waste Champion to drive the fight against food waste.

Who across the waste and resources world has done enough to etch their name into the pantheon of greats as this year’s Legend of Waste? You can tell us now by voting in this year’s Hot 100.

Local authorities will be given “hundreds of millions of pounds” in order to help them boost their recycling rates and waste management performance following the publication of the Resources and Waste Strategy, Environment Secretary Michael Gove told MPs yesterday.

Key stakeholders have largely welcomed the publication of the Resources and Waste Strategy by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), calling it a “blueprint for the future” and “bold and radical”, though some reservations remain.

After 10 years of ensuring its plastic bottles are made completely from recycled plastic, the drinks company Ribena has announced further plans to improve its sustainability.

Plans to introduce separate food waste collections to every household in England by 2023 and ensure producers pay for the costs of managing their waste packaging have been included in the long-awaited Resources and Waste Strategy.

A proposed amendment to the Basel Convention tabled by Norway has been criticised by the European Federation of Waste Management and Environmental Services, arguing it could negatively affect the European market for plastic waste.

More than 300 refuse collectors, members of the Unite union working for Birmingham City Council, are set to strike between Christmas and New Year over payments made by the council to workers in a different union that did not take part in strike action during last summer’s bin dispute.

A trial in London will see plastic KeyKegs, commonly used to store beer and wine, collected for recycling into new kegs by reprocessors OneCircle.

Eunomia Research and Consulting has announced this week that it will be opening a new office in Athens, Greece, while one of the company’s Directors, Joe Papineschi, is moving to Brussels to lead its European operations.