Recently, one of the recycling sector’s news websites carried a story under the heading of ‘Church takes cool stance on “resource”’. At first glance, it made me muse briefly on why the Church of England had seen fit to make a policy statement about waste and resources, and then I realised of course that they weren’t referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury but in fact to Dr Colin Church, Defra’s new man in charge of waste policy as part of his job as Director of Climate, Waste and Atmosphere.

It reported his speech at the recent major conference organised by CIWM (with the ESA) where, in a session under the theme of zero waste, he made the point that although so many in the industry were now talking about waste as a ‘resource’ and trying to stop the use of the word ‘waste’, the reality was that there was a “shed load of policy on waste” which was defined in legal terms specifically using that word, and so the word could not simply be written out of use by our industry.