The London Waste and Recycling Board, which was set up in July last year, claims its new brokerage service will link waste producers such as food manufactures and retailers, with recyclers and energy users to help encourage innovation in waste management in the city.
The Board said its brokerage service is open to any organisation or institution that either produces waste, provides infrastructure or uses waste derived energy, fuel or materials.
Funds and expertise will be provided by the Board for the service, which it claims will facilitate discussions between the various parties to generate and develop projects that can manage London's waste including the establishment of anaerobic digestion sites to create energy as well as recycle waste materials.
“We calculate that the total energy that can be supplied by waste is £504m or 10 per cent of London’s gas and electricity bill,” stated the Board.
The Board is asking for expressions of interest from businesses by 1 April.
The announcement of the waste brokerage service follows a call this week from retailer representatives, the British Retail Consortium (BRC), for local authorities to make positive moves to encourage recycling, rather than looking for ways to pile new costs onto retailers.
The BRC was reacting to a new report from the Local Government Association (LGA), released as part of its War on Waste campagin, which claims that supermarkets should pay more for recycling services to reduce the £1.8bn councils will spend in landfill tax on rubbish sites up to 2011.
The report claims that only 40 per cent of food packaging in UK stores is recyclable.
Retailers were critical of the methodology used in the survey, and they argue that while they continue to work to reduce packaging and food waste, the difficulties lies in the fact that consumers can not always recycle packaging because often local facilities do not exist.
The supermarkets maintain that the responsibility does not lie with just retailers but with local authorities to make facilities consistently available across all of the UK.