Government

Talking GIB-berish

Just how green is the Green Investment Bank? Eunomia Chairman Dominic Hogg evaluates the institution’s performance when it comes to waste

This article was taken from Issue 81

We’ve now had over two years of the Green Investment Bank (GIB), enough time to evaluate how green its intervention in the waste sector has been. It’s no surprise that the answer is ‘not very’, but much more interesting to ask why.

Back in July 2014, the Environmental Audit Committee called on the GIB to support the circular economy, at the same time calling on government to ‘ensure that its policies for recovering resources and generating energy are aligned and are consistent with the waste hierarchy’.

I suppose that, case by case, the GIB can be said to be applying the waste hierarchy – it hasn’t invested in a landfill site yet. But its overall investment portfolio isn’t that of an organisation striving to apply the hierarchy as a priority.