Background

The Sustainable Organic Resources Partnership was established in 2003 to promote the safe, sustainable and welcome recycling of organic matter. It has individual and corporate members drawn from producers and users of these important resources. SORP aims to provide independent re-assurance on the proper treatment and sustainable management of this material, without which there will not be the confidence amongst producers, users and the wider community that they are and will remain welcome.

It has been estimated that each year around 434 million tonnes of organic resources are produced in the UK , including manures and slurries, biosolids, biowastes and industrial wastes. Of this, around 90 million tonnes of farm manures, 3-4 million tonnes of biosolids and 4 million tonnes of industrial wastes are applied annually to agricultural land. Against this background the regulation of waste management is extending, the opportunity for landfilling is diminishing and the commissioning of new incineration plants is becoming more difficult. Consequently the recycling of organic materials to land, carried out to best practice standards, provides an opportunity to provide benefits to agriculture and soil management and at the same time to solve an urban waste disposal problem.

A key aim pf the Partnership is to promote sustainability in all of its economic, environmental and social aspects. On the economic front, the carefully managed recycling of organic materials to agricultural land enables their nutrient contents to be used for the benefit of crop production and soil fertility, resulting in inorganic fertiliser use savings.

In order to obtain the desired environmental benefits a co-ordinated approach is required to the promotion of best practice in the use of organic materials on land, for example to reduce any risk of environmental pollution. However, in future climate change will be hugely important and greenhouse gas emissions implications of all potential uses of organic resources must be well understood. In the longer term it may also be necessary to consider how practices should be modified once climate change has taken place.

But no recycling programme will be successful without social acceptance and SORP has always recognised that the recycling of organic resources must be carried out in a way that it welcomed by the public at large. This has been, and will remain, one of the major challenges.

Conference aims

This conference therefore aims to

• Review organic resource recycling in the context of sustainability
• Establish how the sustainability of various practices can be assessed
• Consider how to use this information to guide future policy
• Consider how this may be communicated to the public and opinion-formers

2) Waste Strategy – a thematic strategy on waste & recycling

June, London  

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