The CBI recently published a report looking at the case for environmental taxes (http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/1529404/cbi_-_solving_a_taxing_puzzle.pdf), which sets out some principles which it feels environmental taxes should follow.
The report rightly suggests that the landfill tax escalator is an example of an environmental tax which has been implemented well, but it doesn't delve into some of the more interesting questions I would have about whether the tax is set at the right levels.
Landfill tax was originally conceived as a 'pigouvian' tax which corrected for the environmental damage caused by landfill and was set at a rate of £7/tonne back in 1995. It now stands at £64/tonne and will rise to £80/t in 2014.
My personal back of an envelope estimate of an optimal landfill tax would be in the range of £30/tonne. This is based on CO2 emissions from mixed waste at landfill of less than 500g CO2e/tonne processed combined with a carbon price of around £30/tonne (I can't remember the exact government policy assumptions but they are in this sort of range) + disamenity impacts, for which I have taken the original HM Treasury estimate of £7/tonne and inflated it based on a doubling of property prices in real terms since 1995.
We are obviously in a world which has moved well away from these sorts of optimal figures. This is because we must conform to European waste legislation, which doesn't recognise the low cost advantages of landfill in the UK. An optimal waste management portfolio for the UK would have higher levels of landfill than in other EU Member States, but this is not allowed under the command and control target-driven approach to reducing landfill in Europe.
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