The future

Driving up recycling rates

Recycling rates are important. They are the key measure used by the Government to set targets and monitor performance of the country’s 338 local authorities. 

Every year the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) publishes the country’s official recycling rates. In 2020/21 England had an average recycling rate of 44%. Compare that with the 12% recycling rate in 2000/01 and things are looking pretty good. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. 

The problem is that almost all of that progress was made in the first decade of the 21st Century: Since 2010, recycling rates have stagnated, coasting stubbornly along in the low to mid 40 per cents. As a result, the Government missed its target for 50% of household waste to be recycled by 2020. 

A new national recycling target has been set: 65% by 2035. At a regional level the Mayor of London has set boroughs a recycling rate target of 50% by 2030. Given that recycling rates have hardly moved since 2010, how are these ambitious targets going to be achieved? 

In 2018, a Resources and Waste Strategy was published which set out the government’s plans. These include:

1. Consistent collections – make recycling simpler, with easier and more consistent rules to follow for homes and businesses across the country. All local authorities will be required to collect certain materials for recycling, including food waste.
2. Deposit Return Scheme for drinks containers – will see the roll-out of reverse vending machines, where people will be able to deposit plastic bottles and cans in return for cash. Due to be introduced from 2025.
3. Extended Producer Responsibility for dealing with packaging waste – will require producers to pay the full costs of dealing with the waste their products produce. In the past these costs have been met by local council taxpayers. Being phased in from January 2023, the scheme is designed to incentivise producers to ensure the products they place on the market are recyclable and that any unnecessary packaging is reduced.

The Government hopes that these three measures combined will drive up recycling rates once more.

Driving down carbon emissions

It’s easy to see why recycling rates have been the preferred measure of performance for so long. It’s a straightforward calculation that can be replicated with ease by hundreds of local councils across the country. Its simplicity however is also its downfall.  

All a recycling rate tells you is the amount (by weight) of waste that was recycled or composted as a proportion of the amount (by weight) that was landfilled or sent for energy recovery. The problem is that recycling rates aren’t necessarily driving the right decisions when it comes to making the best environmental choices. Here’s an example:

A council decides that it wants to run a food waste minimisation campaign. This will reduce waste, deliver environmental benefits and help residents save money. However, the council believes that the campaign will have the most impact amongst residents who are already recycling their food waste rather than throwing it in the bin. As a result, the campaign could also have a negative impact on the recycling rate, even though it is clearly the right thing to do.

In the future, we believe that measuring carbon will become more important than measuring recycling rates. Accurately and consistently measuring carbon emissions is much more complicated than calculating recycling rates, so it’s not a change that’s coming any time soon. But locally the four SLWP boroughs are fully committed to driving down carbon emissions. We are working hard to benchmark the carbon impact of all our recycling and waste collections and treatment activities and will use this data to help us make the best decisions going forward.

In the future, we believe that measuring carbon will become more important than measuring recycling rates.

Living in a circular economy

Recycling as much as we can helps tackle climate change. But on its own it won’t be enough. It is even more important to waste less (or nothing at all) in the first place. 

That means shifting away from the linear ‘take, make, dispose’ economic model of the last century to a new, circular economy.

In the circular economy, instead of taking resources from the earth, using them once, and recycling or disposing of them, we keep them in use for as long as possible. It means redesigning products to be more durable, reusable, repairable and recyclable. It also means changing the way we consume and use goods and services, and rethinking consumerism as a society.

It’s not going to be easy. We will all need to make sacrifices. But it’s the only way we will protect our planet for future generations and nothing can be more important than that.

The four SLWP boroughs are working hard to accurately measure and benchmark the carbon emissions from all their waste collection and treatment activities. Action plans are being developed to drive carbon emissions down across all our shared operations – further details will be published on this website soon.  In the meantime, there are lots of simple changes we can all make to our daily lives to help us reduce our carbon impact and shift to a more sustainable way of living. See: How can you help?