Ministers told to keep leftover food out of landfill sites

Councils should be given financial support to help them bring in separate food waste collections for households and businesses to ensure a steady supply of organic waste for the renewable power source.

The process known as anaerobic digestion could create enough biogas from green waste and purpose-grown crops to power more than 2.5 million UK homes by 2020, the study from think tank CentreForum suggested.

But barriers to increasing energy from anaerobic digestion need to be removed if the technology is to be scaled up significantly from current levels where it produces enough energy to power 300,000 homes, the report found.

Currently, getting an anaerobic digestion scheme going was like “trying to win a cycle race with the brakes on”, the report’s authors warned.

Anaerobic digestion plants use micro-organisms to break down organic material without oxygen to create biogas that can be burned to produce renewable energy or injected directly into the gas grid. But the study said the schemes often struggle to secure long-term contracts to ensure supplies of the feedstock such as food waste.

The report said that only 13 per cent of homes in England had separate food waste collections, compared to 82 per cent of households in Wales.

A ban on food waste going to landfill would force local authorities to collect leftovers separately from households and businesses, which would provide the supplies needed for anaerobic digestion.

The move is also necessary because the UK will run out of landfill sites by 2020.