§ The Minister for the Environment (Mr. Elliot Morley)I am pleased to announce today the publication of the "Review of Environmental and Health Effects of Waste Management: Municipal Solid Waste and Similar Wastes."
The Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, in its report "Waste not, Want not" recommended that an independent body should bring together the literature and evidence on the relative health and environmental effects of all the different waste management options, relative both to each other and to other activities affecting health and the environment. Defra commissioned this report in response to that recommendation.
The review was commissioned in early 2003, and has been carried out by a team led by Enviros, environmental consultants, and Roy Harrison, Professor of Environmental Health at the Institute of Public and Environmental Health, University of Birmingham. The team should be congratulated on bringing together and considering a wide range of evidence, both from the UK and abroad.
The report examines the waste management options for treating municipal solid and similar waste. It focuses on the principal types of facilities that are currently used for dealing with such waste in the UK and in Europe and on what the currently available scientific evidence can tell us about their environmental and health effects.
It is very comprehensive, bringing together, for the first time, a wealth of evidence from existing studies of the health and environmental impacts of waste management. It provides a convenient and authoritative compendium of current knowledge in this area.
The report has been peer reviewed by the Royal Society and Professor Howard Dalton, Defra's chief scientific advisor, has provided me with advice on the scientific analyses.
The report's authors conclude that, on the evidence from studies so far, present day municipal waste management has at most a minor effect on human health and the environment. For example:
dealing with municipal solid waste by incineration accounts for less than 1 per cent. of UK emissions of dioxins, while domestic sources such as cooking and burning coal for heating account for 18 per cent. of emissions: 83WS less than 1 per cent. of UK emissions of oxides of nitrogen, which reduce air quality, come from municipal solid waste management, while 42 per cent. come from road traffic.The report rightly recognises that there is more that we can and should still learn and we will be addressing the need and priorities for further research through our waste research strategy this summer. The search for knowledge is never complete, and this report usefully identifies areas of research that we will be taking forward as part of our continual efforts to refine the evidence base for policy making.
We must manage the growing amount of waste we produce. We will do this by basing our policies on the best available scientific evidence and on an assessment of the comparative risks. We will continue to develop our scientific knowledge to support our policies. This report is a helpful contribution to that process.