The Green Alliance, an environmental think tank, is urging the construction industry to think of more creative and higher value uses for the waste timber it creates, such as recycling it into furniture and chipboard products.
At the moment, it says that 60% of timber sent for recycling is burned for biomass, and a large proportion of the remainder is used to make animal bedding.
In a report called More jobs, less carbon: why we need landfill bans, the organisation calculates the number of jobs that could be created if five different categories of waste were banned from the UK’s landfill sites and recycled instead.
The Green Alliance argues that the UK puts at least £3.8bn of resources into landfill each year, but keeping them out of landfill would support skilled jobs and cut the UK’s carbon emissions.
It suggests that a legal requirement to recycle the UK’s waste timber would create 3,200 jobs, while textile recycling would create 6,600, electronics recycling would create 9,500, food recycling (via anaerobic digestion plants) would generate 12,100 and plastics 16,100.
Dustin Benton, head of resources at the Green Alliance, said: “Construction has done pretty well on getting the level of waste arisings down in the last few years. But wood waste is an interesting area. A relatively small amount of wood gets collected and re-used, a lot gets burned.
“60% of collateral wood is burned as biomass, and what really surprised us is that higher grade used wood is often used for animal bedding. But there are a lot of great opportunities for wood re-use, as furniture or to be recycled into chipboard.”
The Green Alliance’s new figures are part of its campaign to press for landfill bans for particular waste products in England and Wales. It says that similar bans have already been introduced in Scotland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and several US states.
Benton said: “There is no good reason for putting food waste into landfill, it should all be anaerobically digested. There’s also lots of interest in directing plastics away from landfill, the British Plastics Association is talking about it. And there’s plenty of potential for recycling electronics, most items are thrown away long before they’re obsolete.”
