Last November, just as winter was turning up late for its shift (blimey did it go on to make up for lost time), I attended Wrap’s annual conference. For the uninitiated, Wrap was, at the time, one of several government-funded bodies in the recycling and waste reduction field.

Dr Liz Goodwin, the chief executive, told the conference how the agenda has moved on in recent years. It used to be all about waste paper bins and food packaging. Now the focus is very much about the waste hierarchy. And while the domestic arena has been bombarded with educational campaigns, followed by kerb-side collection green bins, brown bins and everything in-between, the focus was now on businesses, she said. Then up stepped Marc Bolland, CEO of Morrisons. He regaled us with how his supermarket’s integrated supply chain reduces waste at every level; 72 per cent of any waste got recycled.

Cut to the present day, and it’s still very cold and wintery. But Marc Bolland is running M&S, and Wrap is soon to take control of all Defra-funded resource efficiency bodies. The worlds of business and waste reduction, it seems, move at an equally fast pace. And, as if to prove the point, a particularly harsh shock lurks around the corner.

1 April 2010 ushers in the following: first, the opening salvos of the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC). As reported by PM in December, the UK’s first domestic cap and trade scheme requires organisations with annual electricity bills of approximately £500,000 or above to measure and report their energy usage. It’s not voluntary, it’s a legal obligation. Vincent Neate, KPMG's UK head of sustainability, has recently warned that “many of the scheme's participants are not yet fully prepared for the CRC”. Some, he believes, are clinging on to the vain hope that the scheme will be cancelled at the last minute. It won’t.

Second, landfill tax will also be increased on 1 April – to £40 a tonne. As reported in PM last week, it will be going up every April from now until 2013, making it more and more cost-effective to reduce, reuse, and recycle, rather than throwing waste away.

The message from government, in case you haven’t got it already, is that business is not to be trusted to do the right thing. A green world is one where legislation rules. If you want to be wasteful, you’ll have to positively hold it as a business priority to do so. And, in more ways than one, pay the consequences.