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Have your say on garden waste
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AG readers are being asked to take part in the Government’s consultation on garden-waste collections Rebecca Pow: “get to the nitty-gritty”
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Have your say on waste
readers asked to join garden waste consultation
THE Government is calling on AG readers to take part in a national survey to establish the future of garden-waste collections. The two relevant questions in the survey relate to what should be classified as ‘garden waste’ , and whether householders with gardens would be interested in a ‘free minimum collection service for garden waste’ .
Rebecca Pow MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), told AG she is keen for readers to take part as they are the key target audience the Government wants to reach.
Ms Pow, who used to write a column
for AG, said: “We did the first consultation about garden waste in 2019, and we are now on the second one and getting down to the real nittygritty of finance and the benefits.
“Most households pay for their garden waste to be collected, and the average is £43 a year and we want to know whether the service could be free. ”
The benefits of garden-waste collection include an increased ‘carbon saving’ , which helps the environment, and the chance for local authorities to recycle green waste into compost, which can then be used by councils and local people instead of peat compost.
In May 2021 the Government announced that from 2024 it will be banning the sale of compost that contains peat to gardeners.
Raising our carbon saving Ms Pow added: “A nationwide garden-waste collection scheme would substantially raise our carbon saving to the level of removing around 176,000 cars off the road every year. The Government would cover the cost of the service to the local authorities and we are looking at a free household collection every fortnight. ”
She added that the free limit would be 240 litres per household, which equates to one wheelie bin or large garden sack.
The Government is also keen to encourage more home composting, as Ms Pow says far too much garden waste tends to end up in landfill at the moment, which she describes as “at the bottom of the waste hierarchy” .
To take part in the garden-waste consultation, which closes at 23:59 on Sunday 4 July 2021, go to consult. defra.gov.uk/waste-and-recycling/ consistency-in-household-and-businessrecycling and click on Proposal 7, which is the garden-waste classification page, then Proposal 8, which is the collectionscheme proposal page.
Peat bogs will be restored in a multi-million pound scheme
The ban on peat
Sales will be illegal post-2024 THE Government has vowed to ban the sale of peat composts by 2024.
The move is part of the ambitious Tree and Peat Action Plans, which were drafted to support the Convention of Biological Diversity Climate Change Conference (COP26) being held later this year.
The aims include investing £21m between 2020 and 2025 to Peat compost support UK tree will be banned nurseries and treble the UK’s tree-planting.
More importantly for gardeners, the peat initiative includes the banning of retail peat compost by 2024 and ploughing millions into the restoration of 35,000 hectares of degraded peatlands in England over the next four years. There’s an appetite for the peat ban This includes £2.7 million to be directed towards the Great North Bog in the north of the country, which covers vast areas of the Pennines, Yorkshire Dales and Forest of Bowland.
Rebecca Pow, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at DEFRA, said: “We want to phase out peat during the life of this parliament and we are trying to speed things up and move as quickly as we can. ”There is obviously an appetite for it so a part of this consultation will be setting a date for the banning of peat and investigating other ideas, such as introducing a point-of-sale charge on peat products when they are purchased, much in the same way as happened with carrier bags. ”
