MPs back a Bill to promote recycling

Bradford Council supplies 15,000 homes with green bins with plans to extend that to about 100,000. But only ten per cent of the district's waste is recycled - one per cent below the national average.

The Doorstep Recycling Bill, introduced by Joan Ruddock, Labour MP for Lewisham Deptford, will be debated in Parliament next month.

Friends of the Earth in West Yorkshire hopes the law would bring the UK into line with the rest of Europe. Yorkshire has the second worst recycling figures in the country.

Friends of the Earth campaigner Tim Sanders, of Oxenhope, said: "Massive increases in recycling are needed if the UK is to improve on its woeful recycling record and to reduce its dependence on environmentally-damaging landfill and incineration."

In the UK, 11 per cent of waste is recycled, compared to 50 per cent in Germany, Holland and Switzerland and 64 per cent in Austria.

The Government's target is for 30 per cent of domestic waste to be recycled by 2010. About 81 per cent of waste is buried in landfill sites, but the EU requires less than a third to be dumped by 2020.

The new law would create 521 jobs in Bradford and more than 6,000 in Yorkshire, according to Friends of the Earth, who say that four of the area's MPs Marsha Singh (Bradford West), Ann Cryer (Keighley), Chris Leslie (Shipley) and Paul Truswell (Pudsey) have signed a pledge to back the bill.

Terry Rooney (Bradford North) is also keen to get the bill through. He said: "We are running out of places to dump rubbish and landfill tax costs councils money which could be spent on other things."

Bradford Councillor Anne Hawkesworth, pictured, with responsibility for the environment, said: "We are aiming for all households to have recycling bins, initially for paper. But if the Bill states that bins should be for other, 'multi-sort' items, like plastic or tins, will the Government be providing money to fund this? To have multi-sort bins costs a lot of money."