New waste strategy on plastic essential

WASTE disposal is rarely the sexiest of political issues, but unless we get it right we can create enormous problems for ourselves and future generations.

The Welsh Local Government Association is right to raise concerns about the potential impact of the Chinese government’s “get tough” policy on the import of plastic and other wastes.

How many of us imagine that when we put waste out for recycling that a significant proportion of it will end up being transported by container ship to a country as distant as China?

Most of us naturally assume that it will be processed for reuse fairly locally.

It makes a nonsense of “green” concepts like recycling and carbon reduction when we learn this is not so, but that supposedly recycled waste is travelling halfway across the world, only to be condemned as contaminated.

It’s obvious that things have to change.

The Chinese government’s refusal to accept contaminated waste material from overseas, and its signal to foreign countries that it will get progressively tougher, must act as a spur to the Welsh Government to devise a new waste strategy.

But that in itself could be fraught with difficulties.

An easy solution would be to incinerate much of the waste that cannot be realistically recycled. But we all know that is likely to lead to uproar in communities across the country whenever a proposal is made to build such a facility.

These days incinerators are usually referred to as “energy from waste” facilities, or some such euphemism.

But the lack of candour in the name rarely appeases those living nearby who are concerned about the possible health implications of toxic emissions.

However much politicians and environmentalists talk in idealistic terms about waste elimination, there will always be material that we need to dispose of.

Of course we must recycle what we can, but pretending that we’re recycling waste when all we’re doing is sending it to China will soon literally be no longer an option.

In our small part of the world, the Welsh Government must come up with innovative solutions that provide new ways of dealing with the problem.

There have already been some initiatives that show promise: the WLGA speaks highly of Rhondda Cynon Taf’s Eco Park, for example.

Waste is a problem that will never go away, and there is no alternative to addressing it.

By reducing the grant to councils to deal with it, the Welsh Government is implicitly stating that its significance is lessening. That isn’t the case.

Council leaders are right to point out the anomaly that an element of their waste budget comes not through the Revenue Support Grant from the Welsh Government, but from a separate pot of money that is being slashed year on year.

We need clarity – but most of all we need a new waste strategy. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2016 was 62.8%