Publications and events
Past publications
September 2009 Greener products. Our new report maps the main environmental policy drivers bearing on products and their production processes and makes an initial assessment of their coherence, for and on behalf of the Designing Out Waste consortium.
February 2008 Good product, bad product? Making the case for product levies. This report challenges the government to provide clear price signals on products like packaging and batteries to reduce their environmental impact.
November 2007 Applications for compostable packaging. This guidance document, to be used in conjunction with a decision-making flow chart, is the culmination of a collaborative process aimed at ensuring that the environmental potential of compostable packaging is realised.
November 2006 A zero waste UK. This report sets out a vision of a zero waste UK, and recommends a package of policy measures to get us there.
June 2006 An international survey of zero waste initiatives. This paper examines a range of zero waste initiatives at local, regional and national level with the aim of identifying practices that are relevant to a 'closed loop' vision of transformed resource use.
March 2005 Return to sender: producer responsibility and product policy. This report analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the concept of producer responsibility, against the background of a new agenda for environmental product policy.
April 2003 Waste not, want not: a collection of responses to government. Spanning academia, the waste industry, local authorities and businesses, this collection of short essays responded to the government strategy unit's investigation into the waste and resources challenges facing the UK.
October 2002 Creative policy packages for waste: lessons for the UK. This report looks at how other countries have delivered much higher recycling rates than the UK and makes recommendations as to how the UK can revitalise its own waste and resources policies.
November 2001 Indicating right: environmental performance indicators for the waste management sector. This report, endorsed by eleven waste companies, reports on a three year project to develop environmental performance indicators for the waste industry.
Past events
December 2009 Pricing out waste. This seminar examined the prospects for using economic instruments to tackle resource use 'upstream' from the landfill tax. In particular, we looked at the aggregates levy as the UK's only example of a raw materials tax, as well as possible policy instruments that could aid substitution and recovery of rare earth metals.
May 2009 Closing the loop closer to home: how to boost UK reprocessing of recyclates. This seminar addressed the questions; why might we want more reprocessing in the UK? What are the measures needed to achieve this?
March 2009 Compostable packaging: where next? Two years on from our original workshop, this event sought to review progress across the supply chain and to explore policy drivers that might bear on compostable packaging in the near future.
January 2009 Green Alliance and publishers Jonathan Cape held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of the UK edition of Cradle to cradle: remaking the way we make things, with co-author Michael Braungart.
December 2007 Retailers, new materials, waste infrastructure and risk: how do we make them work together? This seminar, ran jointly with West Sussex County Council and hosted by Ernst & Young, examined the differing drivers and pressures on organisations through the supply chain, from retailers to local authorities and waste companies. Download a summary of the seminar here.
March 2007 Compostable packaging: getting it right. This workshop, ran jointly with WRAP and the National Non-Food Crops Centre, sought to engage all the key players in the packaging supply chain in a discussion about maximising the environmental benefits of compostable packaging. Find out more at the event page.
November 2006 Launch of A Zero Waste UK. Ben Bradshaw, then minister for waste, launched our report published with the Institute for Public Policy Research and took questions from a large audience about the government's review of Waste Strategy 2000.