Domestic Waste: Recycling

(asked on 11th February 2020) - View Source
Questioner
Ian Lavery Portrait
Ian Lavery
(Labour - Wansbeck)

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate her Department has made of the amount of household recycling that was repurposed in each of the last 10 years.

Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 19th February 2020

Consistent data at this level of detail for the treatment of material collected for recycling is only available for the last four years when a new more detailed data reporting structure was introduced. Table 1 below shows the tonnages of all local authority waste collected in England for recycling as source segregated or comingled material that is sent to landfill, incineration and recycling.

All local authority waste will primarily relate to household waste (approximately 90 per cent) but will include a proportion of non-household waste. The data does not distinguish between material that became refuse derived fuel and solid recovered fuel; a total for material sent for incineration has been provided. Repurposing has been interpreted to mean recycling (including preparation for reuse); detailed information on the specific end uses is not collected.

Due to the complexity of the data and the multiple treatment stages that the material may go through, any consequent slight differences in data recording or cases of unknown treatments, it is possible that there are tonnages that are not fully captured in the landfill and incineration figures but these will be small (a combined maximum 20-40 thousand tonnes in total in any of these years).

Table 1 Treatment of non-residual local authority collected municipal waste in England

Figures are in thousand tonnes

Treatment of Non residual waste

2015/16

2016/17

2017/18

2018/19

Sent to Landfill

146

148

103

78

Sent to Incineration

268

284

357

429

Recycled or Reused

10,473

10,627

10,249

10,215

Notes:-

  1. Figures relate to all (“Household” and “non-household”) local authority waste from non-residual waste streams.

  2. Incineration includes material reported as refuse derived fuel (RDF), incineration with energy recovery, incineration without energy recovery and other heat treatments. Outputs from incineration which are subsequently landfilled are not included in the landfill figures to avoid double counting.

  3. The “Recycled” total does not include material recycled from the residual waste stream and so will not agree with published totals for recycling.

Reticulating Splines