Recycling Municipal Waste for a Greener UK

In 2014 the European Commission adopted an ambitious “Circular Economy Package”, which included several measures concerning waste, and set a target of recycling 65% of all municipal waste by 2030. Now that the Brexit strategy is well under way, the UK has to decide whether it wants to abide by the EU’s objectives or adopt a more lenient legislation on the matter.

To shed light on the issues of waste generation, treatment and recycling in the UK, GreenMatch has decided to conduct research on the figures for recycled municipal waste on local, regional, and national level.

The data was collected from the OECD and the governmental institutions of the four UK countries: England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. First, local authorities were identified within the UK, and then information on total waste generated and total waste recycled was retrieved from their data centers. Further information about the population and demographics was also collected through the official data centers of each country. One map is based on the analysis of waste recycling rates from local councils. The same data was then elaborated on to create a second map, which shows recycling levels on a regional scale.

The second step of the research focused on a wider perspective, through the collection of data inherent to other EU countries and their comparison to both national UK recycling rates and country rates for each of the four countries within the UK.

Billions of tonnes of waste are produced every day but what is done with that waste is not always clear. Some ends up in landfills, other waste is burned to produce energy, and some is reused, recycled, or composted. Recycling can reduce the amount of waste significantly, yet it is still not a generally adopted practice. This report focuses on municipal waste, not to be confused with general waste produced by the public. Municipal waste consists of the total waste generated by households, commerce, offices, institutions, and municipal services.

On the interactive map below, the best and worst performing local waste authorities per country are highlighted based on the percentage of municipal waste recycled. By clicking on a location on the map, you can see the numbers of total waste, total recycled waste, and the percentage of waste recycled for a particular local authority.

The map presents the 10 best and 10 worst performing local authorities in England, and the 5 best and 5 worst performers in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, respectively. Comparing the best performing local authorities in each country gives an insight into the distribution of recycling efforts.

In England, the 10 best performing authorities recycle a median of 57.4% of their waste. In contrast, the bottom 10 performers only reach the median of 23%. Interestingly, the lowest recycling authorities are clustered within the large cities. London has a low rate in particular, where Westminster City Council reached only 15.5% in the year of 2015/2016 (the latest year data was published by the government).

In Wales, the top 5 authorities recycle a median of 63.2% of their waste, while the bottom 5 still perform well by recycling almost half of their waste (48.2%). Clearly, the recycling efforts are more consistent in Wales than in England.

Scotland’s median amongst the 5 highest recycling local authorities amounts to 57.9%, and the 5 bottom performers score around 40%. As even the least recycling authorities manage a fair amount of their waste, calculating with a median on a country level, Scotland has the highest recycling rate in the UK at 53.7%.

The median of Northern Ireland’s 5 highest recycling authorities is 47.8% against a median of 37.5% for the lowest. Of course, the distribution of recycling depends on a multitude of variables, such as population density, urbanisation, and community awareness. It is, however, clear that England’s recycling efforts are falling behind on the rest of the UK.

Obviously, just looking at the local authorities would not suffice to draw any significant conclusions. Some consist mostly of urban areas, like London, whereas others comprise mainly countryside. For this reason, the following map summarises the data on regional level; regions marked with green shading are above the national recycling rate for the entire UK (44.7%), while those marked with red are below that value. Regions consist of multiple local and waste authorities. This is supposed to average out the significant differences that some local authorities might have, or to give a more holistic view.

On a country level (as opposed to the waste authority level), the scene is somewhat different. Wales achieved to outperform all other countries in the UK, as all five of its regions recycle more than the national rate of 44.7%. Even when calculating for the entire country of Wales, they recycle a whopping 10.6% more than UK in total.

Scotland also reached a similar result with its country-level rate of 52.5%, and with having 12 out of 15 regions performing better than the national percentage. The situation is much more similar between England (42.4%) and Northern Ireland (42.0%), as neither countries reached the national value. Actually, only 3 out of 9 English regions and 2 out of 4 Northern Irish regions scored above the national rate.

So how does the UK compare to the EU mainland? Combined, the four UK countries managed to recycle around 44.7% of its total collected municipal waste. In the EU, this number averages out to a mere 42% of all European OECD countries combined.

None of the four countries scores lower than the average of the EU. As a collective, they beat the average by 2.5%. The comparison might leave some room for misinterpretation as the amount of countries in the EU is considerably higher than in the UK. For that reason, the following graph shows all individual countries with their level of recycling in 2015. The UK average of 44.7% has been highlighted by the blue line, and the 2030 target of 65% by the yellow line.

Visibly, the UK is scoring higher than most European countries. The distribution around the EU and UK is quite clustered around the 40-45% mark, with a few exceptions. The current UK level is not alarming, yet. However, the EU target of 65% by 2030 seems to be challenging. Only Germany has already fulfilled that promise.

In the next 13 years, the UK needs to increase their efforts to be able to reach the goal. Whether Brexit has an impact on the progress remains to be seen. In any case, they will not be alone in the fight to greener waste management in Europe.

In the following table, the complete dataset can be seen, detailing how much municipal waste was generated, how much each individual local waste authority recycled of that, and the percentage of recycled waste, broken down per country, region, and local authority.

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