Waste Disposal

(asked on 4th December 2018) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what information his Department holds on the proportion of recyclable material collected by each local authority responsible for waste collection which is (a) recycled and (b) sent (i) to landfill, (ii) for incineration and (iii) for other non-recycling disposal.


Answered by
Thérèse Coffey Portrait
Thérèse Coffey
This question was answered on 11th December 2018

Data on the weight of recycling collected and the subsequent processing of such material is reported by local authorities via the WasteDataFlow website: http://www.wastedataflow.org/home.aspx

Defra does not routinely generate or publish figures at local authority level on the proportions of waste specifically collected for recycling that is not reused or reprocessed. However, detailed data on the end destination of wastes at a local authority level is publicly available and can be downloaded from the WasteDataFlow website.

Defra publishes several datasets on local authority waste. The dataset “Local authority collected waste generation from April 2000 to March 2017 (England and regions) and local authority data April 2016 to March 2017)” found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/env18-local-authority-collected-waste-annual-results-tables, contains the closest measure to those required by this question. This is “Local authority collected - estimated rejects” found in Table 1(a).

This is the estimated tonnage of all rejects from all waste streams at local authority level. This includes both waste specifically collected for recycling and materials separated from the residual waste stream but which are then subsequently rejected.

The dataset does not contain estimates of how these rejects were disposed of.

However, analysis undertaken earlier this year on detailed data at the national (England) level estimated that around 1.3% of the 11.1 million tonnes of waste collected for recycling in 2016/17 ended up in landfill (b). The 1.3% is calculated using the weight of material sent directly and indirectly to landfill and includes the weight of ash from rejected materials sent for incineration.

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