Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what information he holds on the proportion of waste from household (ex NI-192) recorded by local authorities as collected and sent for reuse, recycling, composting or treatment by anaerobic digestion that is successfully reused, recycled, composted or treated by anaerobic digestion.

Defra publishes an annual national statistics release and datasets relating to the collection and disposal of local authority collected waste. The most recent statistics show that 45.5 per cent of ‘waste from households’ in England was sent for recycling, reuse, composting or anaerobic digestion in 2019.

The (ex-192) performance indicator measure of recycling (including reuse, composting, and anaerobic digestion) relates specifically to the ‘household’ waste definition. Figures for 2019/20 are available within Table 3a of the published dataset.

‘Waste from households’ has a slightly different definition to ‘household’ waste and details of these differences can be found in the Glossary of Terms section of the statistical notice.

‘Household’ waste collected for recycling, reuse, composting or anaerobic digestion, which was then rejected by sorting facilities or at the gates of a reprocessor was estimated to be around 525 thousand tonnes (5 per cent) of all material collected for recycling, reuse, composting or anaerobic digestion in 2019/20. This rejected material is diverted to the residual waste stream and does not count towards recycling rates. Defra does not publish this figure on a ‘waste from households’ basis.

The Environment Bill stipulates that all local authorities in England must make arrangements for a core set of materials to be collected for recycling from households. This will help to improve the quality and recycling value of the materials collected and, alongside reforms on labelling, will reduce confusion over the materials that can and cannot be recycled.