To ask the Secretary of State for International Development what steps his Department has taken to reduce the volume of waste produced by it and sent to landfill in each of the last two years. (215890)

The Department for International Development (DFID) has taken a number of steps to reduce waste in recent years. These include:

Using tap water rather than bottled water for all meetings and official business;

Reducing the number of printers in the office and ensuring that these are all set to print double-sided as default, to reduce the amount of paper used;

Replaced disposable cups in our staff restaurant in London with glasses, and reduced the use of condiments, etc., in individual sachets;

Ensured that redundant IT equipment is reused wherever possible, i.e. through donation to charitable organisations;

Increased the number of recycling containers so that paper, etc., is sorted separately.

In the last Sustainable Development in Government report (2007) published by the Sustainable Development Commission, DFID was confirmed to have reduced its waste by 9.6 per cent. in 2006-07 against the Government baseline of 2004-05, so has already met the target to reduce by 5 per cent. by 2010. We also recycled 80.9 per cent. of our waste, meeting the Government target.