Recycling old tyres will help reduce fly tipping, says Stafford MP
An MP has said encouraging the recycling of old car tyres could help reduce problems with fly-tipping in the West Midlands.
Leigh Ingham, MP for Stafford, was speaking during a parliamentary debate on recycling old tyres.
The debate had been called by Liberal Democrat MP Tessa Munt, who voiced concerns that every year the UK exported 350,000 old tyres to India, where they often illegally burned to produce fuel.
Mrs Munt called for the law to be tightened, so that tyres were recycled in the UK instead.
Labour MP Miss Ingham said 'waste cowboys' were a big problem around the villages of her constituency.
She praised environment minister Mary Creagh for her passion about the 'circular economy', which encouraged recycling.
She added: constituencyMinister"Does she agree that the focus on our circular economy is important not only for the environment, but to tackle the criminality around fly tipping and other areas of waste crime?"
Miss Creagh said the amount of money and resources allocated to tackling environmental crime was steadily reduced over the term of the previous government.
"There has been a sense that these are somehow victimless crimes," she said.
"There is always a victim. There is no such place as 'away'. We have only one world, and we have to stop treating our rivers, lakes and seas as sewers, and stop outsourcing our material problems to other countries."
