Report

Cleaning up our act

This report from UK think tank Localis looks at reforming landfill tax for place resilience and best local outcomes.

Over the last thirty years landfill policy has been among the most successful and singularly effective of government environmental policies. Since its introduction, the UK Landfill Tax has succeeded in drastically reducing mixed municipal waste to landfill by 90 percent.

However, there is a principled, place-based case for future long term policy reform to address the following challenges to successful landfill policy. Perverse incentives and misaligned policy risk encouraging behaviours which are harmful environmentally, socially and economically.

Cleaning up our act provides an overview of the key challenges and barriers to efficiency in the current system and presents some possible reforms to bring the landfill tax into line with the policy landscape of the 2020s.