A group of modernising pro-green Tories will today launch a fight-back within the party when they publish a manifesto outlining plans for a £5bn-a-year boost in economic growth, creating 300,000 jobs, by pursuing environmentally friendly policies.

In a sign of their determination to challenge Tory climate-change sceptics after a leading minister said that David Cameron was getting rid of "green crap", the modernisers will say that the most successful economies of the future will embrace both the environment and competitiveness.

The publication of the manifesto by the 2020 group of Tory MPs came after the former Conservative environment secretary Lord Deben launched an offensive on climate-change sceptics.

In a series of tweets Deben – the father of green Tories in his days, and formerly known as John Gummer – said he hoped the sceptics would stop insulting pro-green campaigners and accept that they were denying science.

Echoing comments by the Prince of Wales, who depicted climate-change deniers as the "headless chicken brigade", Deben tweeted: "If we accept advice of 95% of scientists & they're wrong, we've cleaned atmosphere. If we deny them & they're right, we've buggered the planet."

The 2020 group of modernisers, many of whom feel as strongly as Deben about climate change, have cast their arguments in purely economic terms and have been careful not to use the words "green" or "sustainable" in their manifesto.

This is a deliberate tactic hammered out at a private meeting with Cameron following his alleged "green crap" comments to try to win over George Osborne – who put the brakes on the "Vote Blue, Go Green" approach when he said in his speech to the 2011 Tory conference that Britain would go "no slower but also no faster" than any other EU country in carbon emission cuts.

The 2020 group's biggest proposal is to boost profits for manufacturers by £5bn a year, creating 300,000 jobs, by tightening the rules on waste products. The group proposes that laws banning valuable products, including mobiles phones, from being put in landfill, be extended to cover plastics, wood, textiles and food.

Laura Sandys, the Conservative MP for Thanet South, who chaired the work preparing for the 2020 manifesto, said: "By making sure things go further – and actually ensuring they travel round the economy rather than being dumped – we must ensure that waste is seen as a resource and not a liability. Only about 17% of everything we call waste today is really waste."

Sandys said that restrictions would be placed on putting food in to landfill. "It would be taken away – you wouldn't have to have it at home. But it would be used in anaerobic digestion and utilised in food-to-energy."

The modernisers also call for a rethink away from what Sandys calls the "British Leyland" mentality, which says that the strength of an economy is measured solely by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the size of an economy.

"We are going to have to look at what we are really achieving and not what I call British Leyland metrics," Sandys said. "British Leyland produced a lot of cars. It had a lot of GDP. Nobody wanted the cars but nobody seemed to care.

"If we are going to be competitive we can't replicate an old-fashioned 19th century business model. We are going to have to be in the new world which looks at resources in a very intelligent way. We focus on labour productivity when the developing world is looking at resources in an intelligent way."

The modernisers say that their approach could involve a fall in GDP, as they press for a more efficient approach to the use of energy, but said that illustrated some of the problems with the standard economic measure.

Sandys said: "If energy prices go up, which they have, GDP goes up. If we reduce our energy consumption, or we bear down on the price, GDP will go down but our margin will go up. If you spend a pound on energy it is a very dead pound.

"There is a very short supply chain and on the whole it is primarily imported. If you go out and spend a pound that will be much more productive because there will be a value-added supply chain. That pound will travel faster round the economy than the pound that goes on energy."

The approach of the modernisers is summed up by Tom Burke, chairman of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism, who said it was wrong to put "the environment and the economy at opposite ends of a see-saw".

Pursuing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology could create a new industry worth between £15bn and £35bn by 2030 employing tens of thousands of people, a report from the industry and trade unions has found.