Wrexham 588 Liverpool 300,000

This is a reply to an e-mail sent to the First Minister about Hafod... it turns out Wrexham exports 588 tonnes of waste to England while we're expected to take 300,000 in return.

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Dear X

Thank you for your e-mail of 31 August to the First Minister regarding Mersey Waste Holdings landfilling waste from England at Hafod Quarry. I have been asked to reply.

Planning permission for Mersey Waste to landfill at Hafod Quarry pre-dates the National Assembly and was granted on appeal by the Secretary of State for Wales in 1995.

I can assure you that local authorities whose waste is handled by Mersey Waste will not avoid any controls on landfilling by sending it to a site in Wales, and Environment Agency Wales has to ensure that it will meet all the required standards to safeguard health and the environment.

To place this issue in context, Welsh local authorities also send waste to be landfilled in England and all of Wales' hazardous waste that needs to be disposed of in landfill is sent to England as well as significant amounts of waste from the industrial/commercial and construction/demolition sectors. According to information submitted by local authorities to the Environment Agency through WasteDataFlow, in 2005-06 Welsh local authorities exported 36,966 tonnes of municipal waste to be deposited into three different landfill site in England. Most of this waste arose in Monmouthshire, with the remaining 588 tonnes from Wrexham and 41 tonnes fromm Denbighshire.

Both the Welsh Assembly Government and Defra have plans in place for local authorities to reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill and significant improvments have been made year on year.

The Welsh Assembly Government in its National Waste Strategy "Wise about Waste" seeks to promote sustainable waste management and to reduce the amount of waste, including municipal waste sent to landfill. Since 2000-01 local authority recycling and compostingi in Wales has increased from about 6% to nearly 20% in 2004-05, the last year for which data is available. (The way in which the data is collected has changed since 2000-01 but the 6% figure is reasonably comparable with the current way in which we collect the waste management data). Local authorities are expected to reach 25% recycling and composting by 2006-07 and 40% by 2009-10.

Yours sincerely


Cai Jones
Waste Policy Branch
Environment Policy and Protection Division