Britain's bin baron says: get recycling like the Germans

The man with a mission to make us Europe's greenest nation tells John-Paul Flintoff the war will start with supermarket packaging

Paul Bettison is talking rubbish. As chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, Councillor Bettison frequently talks rubbish. But today he's talking more rubbish than I can imagine: almost 27m tons of it.

According to the LGA, the average British household produces half a ton of rubbish a year. In total, we send 7m tons more rubbish to landfill than any other country in Europe. One country in particular puts us to shame: Germany has 25% more people but produces less than half as much trash.

And now we're running out of space to bury it all. Within nine years there'll be no landfill sites left, says Bettison. At current rates of disposal we'll fail to meet our obligations under the European Union landfill directive. Councils, and consequently taxpayers, face fines of up to £150 for each ton of rubbish over set limits dumped in landfill. The National Audit Office predicts a total fine of up to £200m.

Then there's climate change: it takes a lot of energy, and creates a lot of emissions, to manufacture rubbish in the first place, then to ferry it to landfill or burn it. The consequences were underlined by the European commission last week: global warming, it said, could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine and migration. And that's why councils are promoting “three Rs” for the 21st century — reduce, reuse and recycle.

New Zealand, Western Australia, California, Toronto and even a couple of English local authorities have adopted a target of zero waste by 2020 — with the goal that everything produced will be reused or recycled, and nothing incinerated or sent to landfill.

Siân Berry, principal speaker of the Green party, says: “If we go whole-heartedly for recycling, reuse and waste minimisation, we would create thousands of jobs, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and conserving finite resources.” Thus a fabric conditioner bottle, which will last a thousand years, would be taken back to the supermarket to be refilled. Indeed, shoppers would walk into supermarkets with almost as much packaging as they take away.

Variously nicknamed “bin baron” and “trash czar”, Bettison oversees environmental policy on behalf of 411 councils across England and Wales. A retired printer, now in charge of Tory-led Bracknell Forest borough council in Berkshire, he's a large man who wears spectacles, a white shirt and tie, a gold watch on one wrist and a gold chain on the other. Not particularly close to the green stereotype, but it's quite obvious he finds climate chaos terrifying.

I've seen for myself, as a former binman, how filthily and chaotically some householders put out rubbish. And having worked a whole shift with mushroom sauce and coffee grounds in my ear, I have little sympathy for householders who can't be bothered to sort their waste.

But is his diagnosis of the national problem correct? And are his proposed remedies workable? Many people will find it hard to believe we are running out of space for landfill. But as Bettison explains, we usually dump rubbish in old quarries and we're filling up the holes much faster than we're excavating them. Anyway, some spaces aren't suitable because the contents of rubbish — cat food, old batteries, nappies, aspirin — might leak out, poisoning water sources.

The alternative is incineration, but few communities are clamouring to have incinerators built in their areas. So the most important part of Bettison's war on waste lies in reducing the production of rubbish in the first place.

“People power has a large role to play,” he says. “If you buy four or five apples at the supermarket, you can buy them loose or pre-packed in a plastic tray. That might look nice, but you're not going to submit it to an exhibition or a harvest festival — you're going to take it home and throw it away. If we stopped doing that — if the public stopped buying apples in trays — within a month the supermarkets would stop selling them that way. And councils can encourage consumers to do that.”

So much for “reduce”. When it comes to “reuse”, Bettison commends the work of his crack troops: elderly volunteers working in charity shops and reselling all kinds of hitherto unwanted items. Councils support these shops, he points out, by waiving commercial rates on retail sites that might otherwise stand empty. The internet also helps — through businesses such as eBay, and networks such as Freecycle, where unwanted goods change hands at no cost.

Hoping to influence the forthcoming local government bill, Bettison popped next door before Christmas to the offices of Defra and outlined his strategy for the war on waste to David Miliband, the environment secretary. “And David said, ‘I'm up for this.' Which I think is encouraging.”