Recycling and Waste

This book focuses on contemporary environmental policy in developed economies. Its main subject is the recycling of re-usable materials within the municipal waste stream in the cities of London and Hamburg, The research behind this volume consisted of a survey of the London Boroughs to examine the organization and extent of recycling activity, complemented by a set of semi-structured interviews with key agents in London and Hamburg at national and local levels. The Hamburg material served as a comparative case study to further the analysis of of developments in the UK. Having demonstrated the importance of the conservation of materials to environmental policy, the basic research theme is the identification of the underlying barriers to raising levels of materials recycling towards technically achievable levels. This is examined in relation to the debate over the relative efficacy of market-based and regulatory policy instruments, and attempts to integrate economic and environmental policy making during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Three key aspects are identified: the administrative structure of local government; the costs of urban recycling programmes in comparison with other forms of waste disposal such as landfill and incineration; the political and economic pressures since the 1970s to cut the cost of municipal waste management and simultaneously raise environmental standards, which are leading to a process of de -municipalization in waste management.