Food Waste to Energy

I am sure that my officials, very over-burdened as they are at the moment, would be delighted to arrange that. I noted the points that my hon. Friend made about the problems of the planning system. One of the announcements that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government made yesterday will, we hope, help to ease the planning process for such significant environmental waste management projects. We can have all the right waste management policies in the world, but if, because of the planning process, local authorities and businesses cannot establish the recycling facilities, the energy-from-waste facilities, the anaerobic digestion facilities and the other facilities that my hon. Friend talks about, there is no doubt that we will have a real problem not only with meeting our landfill diversion targets—with the resultant fines for local authorities, which would not be popular in her constituency—but with meeting our environmental goals. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to stress the importance of diverting more of our waste away from landfill. I think that we are third out of all 25 countries, or out of the old EU countries, in terms of our reliance on landfill, and although our reliance has decreased significantly in recent years, we need to do an awful lot better. Food waste, as my hon. Friend also rightly says, is a major source of methane. If food waste goes to landfill, it can rot down into methane, which is one of the most potent greenhouse gases—21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. As I said, we will announce a number of measures in the waste strategy on Thursday, in particular to target food collection from households and to encourage local authorities to extend separate food collections. Research shows that where that happens, it is much easier to re-use, recycle, compost or divert into a new technology such as Inetec’s that food waste, and to make a valuable resource out of it. Exciting things are on the way. If I may, I shall say a little about anaerobic digestion, because that is another technology that has huge potential. Without being a technical expert and without having studied Inetec’s technology, I suspect that my hon. Friend may also be interested in some of the measures that we hope will be in the energy White Paper tomorrow to encourage these alternative technologies. We hope that changes to the renewables obligation certification scheme will serve as a major boost to anaerobic digestion and to other technologies to help to manage food waste. I cannot remember whether my hon. Friend has any rural areas in her constituency, but anaerobic digestion also has major potential for dairy and other livestock farmers, who may be worried about what they will do with all their slurry when the nitrates directive kicks in. There is massive potential for a win-win situation in terms of sustainable environmental management of farms and increasing farmers’ incomes by using slurry as a positive fuel in some of these technologies. My hon. Friend will be aware that the way that we collect waste is intimately linked to the way in which it can be processed, and thus to the value that we can extract from it, whether as a recyclate or as an energy source. Nowhere is that more true than with household waste collection. There has been an awful lot of ill-informed comment in the press in recent weeks on that issue. We shall say more about it in the waste strategy, but I can say, without revealing too much of the detail, that the objective of that strategy is to pursue the course that I think my hon. Friend and her colleagues on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee would endorse. It is to move away from our reliance on landfill, to stop treating waste as waste and to treat it as a resource, and to try to move this country to a position where we do not accept, as we have in the past, a throwaway society. We need to stop throwing away into landfill anything that has a useful or valuable potential, because that not only contributes to greenhouse gas emissions but means that we are constantly using virgin materials—many of which, such as wood and oil, are from the developing world—to generate energy when we could be generating it, as my hon. Friend rightly says, from the waste that we all produce. I was interested to hear my hon. Friend say that there was the potential for 75 per cent. of a given town’s or city’s energy to come from waste. That sounds like a high figure to me, but I will certainly look at it. If it is right, it will make even more strongly the argument that we will make when we publish our energy White Paper tomorrow and our waste strategy on Thursday. In summary, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising such an important topic. I have tried to explain what the Government believe can be done to join up our policies on waste, energy, biomass and planning, and we will see a good example this week of not only joined-up government, but very active government. A lot has been said in recent weeks and months about the Government’s being adrift or in limbo during this period of transition, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has certainly been hyperactive, not only on the waste strategy, but on the Climate Change (Effects) Bill and so forth. This week, a whole tranche of new policies will be published that are vital to our economic and environmental futures. Indeed, that will happen against the background of a policy vacuum on the other side of the House, but I will leave that for others to judge. When my hon. Friend sees the strategies that will be published tomorrow and on Thursday, I am sure that she will welcome them in her usual constructively critical way.