In England and Wales industry, commerce and households produce over 100 million tonnes of waste each year. That is over 1.5 Tonnes of waste for each man, woman and child. This figure is growing at around 3% each year. More...........

However in today's Society it isn't just a matter of the Government setting targets and then letting them slip. We now have legislation to add some impetus to achieving these targets. For example we now have the Household Waste Recycling Act 2003.  

This legislation imposes targets on local authorities to improve the amount of waste that is re-cycled. We also have the Waste Minimisation Act 1998 which gives Local Authorities Power to take steps to minimise generation of controlled waste.  

What is Producer Responsibility?
Producer responsibility in the UK is a policy tool that is an extension of the "polluter pays" principle, and is aimed at ensuring that businesses who place products on the market take responsibility for those products once they have reached the end of their life. At this stage, producer responsibility has been the policy approach taken in relation to the management of waste products, but there is no reason why a similar policy should not be developed to address the environmental issues connected with, for example, the manufacturing stage of a product's life cycle.

A "producer responsibility" policy underlies the approach taken in implementing the EC Directive on Packaging and Packaging Waste in the UK and is the approach taken in both the EC Directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and End of Life Vehicles (ELV) Directives. More.........

At the website of the Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) the four main problems that collectively mean that local authorities often find plastics recycling very expensive are listed as:

• the high volume to weight on plastic means that the collection and transport of this waste is difficult and expensive.
• there are often high levels of contamination in plastic making the recyclate less useable, especially where food products are involved.
• there is a very wide range of plastics in use and segregation can be a key problem - the value of recyclate is often much higher where different types of material are collected separately.
• the market for using recycled plastic is less developed than it might be and the market price reflects this.

So the ability to re-cycling plastic is at present part of the problem from the Government's perspective. It is therefore also a major part of the solution to improving waste re-cycling and achieving the targets being placed on Local Authorities through the recent legislation.  

This is where ERT's technology is helping to arrest the problem by the re-cycling of waste plastic and other substances in a way that has not been possible up to now. This is because we believe that the unique PIM process offers the potential for the significant use of recycled material to make a product which itself would be recyclable at the end of its useful life.

For local authorities and other organisations who would like to find out more please contact us and we will be in touch.