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Waste Management

Answer

A draft of the Waste Management (England and Wales) Regulations 2005 was issued for public consultation but the regulations have not yet been made and laid before Parliament. The consultation paper is available on the department’s website at www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/agwaste-regs/consultation.pdf.Following that consultation, and an adverse judgment by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on infraction proceedings by the European Commission against the UK, we are now finalising the Waste Management (England and Wales) Regulations 2006. The main purpose of the forthcoming regulations is to repeal the exclusion in Section 75(7)(c) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and to apply to agricultural waste the national controls that are already in place to comply with the Waste Framework Directive (WFD) and the Landfill Directive. Our aim is to make and lay the regulations before Parliament by 31 March 2006. The regulations will apply to the agricultural industry the controls that already apply to all other sectors of industry.The consultation paper published with the draft regulations included at Annexe 1 a partial regulatory impact assessment (RIA). A full RIA will be published when the final Regulations are made and laid before Parliament. The consultation paper set out in Chapter 3 the five basic options available to farmers for the disposal or recovery of their agricultural waste when the regulations come into force. It is a matter for decision by individual farmers which of these options they use.For this reason, the Government have made no estimate of the amounts of agricultural waste which farmers will dispose of by recycling, landfilling or incineration; or, of the agricultural waste that will be incinerated, what percentage will be used for heating, or power generation. The environmental and health benefits of ending on-farm disposal practices such as the open burning of non-natural agricultural waste (e.g. plastic bottles) are discussed in Section 3 of the RIA published with the consultation paper. The RIA estimates total agricultural waste arisings of 355,304 tonnes p.a. (England and Wales) and states in paragraph 10.2 that the department’s assumptions, for the purposes of estimating the cost of the proposed regulations, are that:"None of the farm dumps which are currently used to dispose of agricultural waste will be able to meet the standards required by the Landfill Directive;""98 per cent. of farmers will decide to consign their agricultural waste for disposal off-farm; and""all such waste will be consigned for disposal at licensed landfill site."Article 13 of the WFD requires establishments or undertakings which operate under the terms of a permit/licence authorising the disposal or recovery of waste, or a registered permit/licence exemption, to be subject to appropriate periodic inspections by the competent authorities (e.g. the Environment Agency). I understand that the Environment Agency intends to fulfil this requirement in relation to agricultural waste through efficiencies gained from its Integrated Inspection of Agriculture project rather than by engaging additional inspectors.Private householders are not ““establishments or undertakings”” for the purposes of the WFD and are not therefore subject to the directive’s permit/licence requirements. However, the ECJ’s judgment on the WFD infraction found that the UK had failed to fulfil its obligations in relation to Article 4 of the directive and the disposal of household waste within the curtilage of domestic properties The proposed regulations will therefore amend Section 33(1)(c) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 to make it an offence for a householder to dispose of household waste within the curtilage of a domestic property in a manner likely to cause pollution of the environment or harm to human health.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

678 c127-8WA; 3639

Session

2005-06

Subjects

Agriculture EU law Electricity generation Landfill Heating Incinerators Recycling Waste management Waste Statutory instruments

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk