The Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee is recommending that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) review its current waste legislation. Speaking to letsrecycle.com, chair of the committee Lee Marshall said that changes to other areas of law mean that it makes sense for Defra to review its current policies. He told the website To be fair I think we are at the stage now where we could do with a complete and thorough review of legislation. A lot of current legislation is linked into the Environment Protection Act, which came in 18 years ago.Mr Marshall added that the committee believed that local authorities should be able to charge for recycling and residual refuse but not be forced to. We can see the merit in incentives, but the way it is set up looks bureaucratic and making it revenue-neutral makes it unwieldy.Today, Defra has announced that it has increased its packaging waste recovery targets to 72 per cent for this year. This will be increased to 74 per cent by the end of 2010.