He went on to say that in addition to higher recycling targets, more advice and producer responsibility agreements, the consultation document therefore contains proposals for targets to reduce the proportion of business waste land filled, with more help for small businesses.

I also believe that energy from waste should have a clearer role to play in recovering value from our waste resources.  However, this should not be at the expense of practical waste prevention and recycling.  Consequently, we now expect that around 25% of household waste will be treated by energy from waste by 2020, rather than the 33% anticipated in Waste Strategy 2000.

The debate must be fully informed by the evidence, on environmental, health and economic effects, and I welcome the Chartered Institution’s recent position statement on energy from waste as a contribution to this debate.

Getting in place the necessary investment capacity continues to be a high and urgent priority.  To this end, we are proposing measures to strengthen central and regional co-ordination and advice on procurement to help local authorities make the investment, building on the changes already made in Government’s policy guidance on sustainable waste management (Planning Policy Statement 10).

With the necessary capacity in place, we have good prospects of achieving significantly higher recycling levels for household waste than proposed in 2000; the consultation therefore proposes more ambitious national recycling and composting targets for household waste to 40% in 2010 and 50% by 2020.