Wales is a winner on waste

Environment minister for Wales, Jane Davidson opened consultation on the ‘Food Manufacture, Service and Retail Sector plan’ for waste last month. She did so during a visit to Wales’s first commercial-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) plant at Premier Foods’s RF Brookes factory at Rogerstone Park, near Newport.

The InSource Energy plant is one of the first in the UK to use waste from food production to create energy to feed back into the production process. It is at the commissioning stage and will be fully operational this summer.

AD treats food waste to produce a liquid that can be used as a fertiliser and biogas fuel. It is the Assembly government's favoured solution for treating food waste.

Davidson said: "Wales's ambition is to recycle 70% of its waste by 2025 and be zero waste by 2050. If we are to achieve this we all need to play our part. The Food Manufacture, Service and Retail plan sets out our proposals for how these sectors can reduce the waste they produce and manage any waste they create in as sustainable a way as possible."

In three years Premier Foods has gone from paying £7,500 a month to receiving a £1,200 rebate, and has almost doubled the amount of waste it recycles at its two Welsh sites: RF Brookes and Avana Bakeries. Md Phil Coles said: "If we had done nothing then we would have seen a £45,000 increase in costs each year. We know that our zero to landfill target is achievable."

The consultation on the waste plan will be open until June 22.