Charging for domestic waste in England: Combining environmental and equity considerations

Compared with most other EU member states, the UK has relatively low rate of recycling of household waste, and sends a relatively high proportion of disposal in landfill. Under the provisions of the EU Landfill Directive, this situation will hve to change radically in the next ten years, with much less waste being sent to landfill, in a context in which the qunaity of household waste continues to increse at about 3% per year. A number of national policy documents have in recent years proposed how this challenge might be addresed, most recently the report from the Strategy Unit in 2002, Waste Not, Want Not.