Defra’s double waste whammy

I am a keen recycler, but was astonished to read in the latest PR Week that Defra is paying a PR company £94,000 to launch a recycling campaign for Christmas with the key messages reduce, reuse and recycle.

The government already funds a quango called WRAP – the Waste, Resource and Action Programme – to get these messages across, so why is Defra hiring an outside company as well? No wonder Conservatives have earmarked WRAP for sweeping cuts if it should win the general election.

Quangos, an abbreviation of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations, employ more than 90,000 people and operate outside direct government control despite being funded almost entirely from the public purse.

It has been reported that WRAP’s four-strong board of directors shared a half-a-million pound pay packet and £354,000 of taxpayers’ cash was used to make 20 of their workers redundant in a cost-cutting exercise.

Christmas is a key time to promote recyling, but shouldn’t WRAP be leading on this instead of Defra? Does it have the right staff to do this following its swathe of redundancies? If not, how effective is it?

The PR contract has been awarded to Threepipe, and they are using the same key messages – the same three Rs that I was promoting as press officer for local authorities on waste and recycling initiatives eight years ago in the Eastern Region.

One Christmas we were delighted when the loveable actor Christopher Biggins, who was appearing in the Cambridge panto, agreed to this photoshoot to encourage householders to recycle Christmas trees; he did this completely free of charge, out of the goodness of his heart.

The biggest problem with Christmas recycling is that contractors hired by local authorities have long breaks over the festive period and do not clear up the overflowing bottle banks until after the New Year; many recycling centres used to  be closed too, causing an avalanche of complaints in the local press.

I would suggest that Defra follows the three Rs itself by reducing the money it is wasting, reusing its team at WRAP to promote Christmas recycling, and continue to recycle its key messages as figures published this week show that the UK still sends more municipal waste to landfill than any other EU member state.

*Btw, I likedWRAP’s campaign highlighting how much food we waste. Now it’s up to supermarkets to change its special offers to help prevent unnecessary over-buying.