ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the key changes required and proposes four innovative national targets. The ten players involved in implementing these changes are: the UK and devolved Governments; producers; retailers; consumers; local authorities; the waste management industry; and the reprocessing industries. The key responsibilities of each player for delivering the changes are set out in detail. This is followed by a discussion of the need to educate both children and adults to help them support the required changes. The final conclusions are that: producers need to design-with-the-end-in-mind to make products and packaging reuseable, repairable and recyclable; producers and retailers must implement simple take-back collection arrangements for products, including developing the required repair and dismantling infrastructures; local authorities need to implement simple, kerbside collection arrangements for co-mingled packaging materials and for food and garden “waste”; and the UK and devolved Governments should ban the export of Household Waste for recycling, place a moratorium on the development of new EfW incineration capacity and impose an Incineration Tax. The author is confident the required changes can be achieved and that there are solutions to all aspects of the problem. He is encouraged by the responses to the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic, when previously unthinkable progress was made extremely quickly. The book ends with a plea for all players to act quickly and not just talk, to avoid the Anthropocene becoming the sixth cause of planetary destruction and mass extinction.
