Fewer councils report zero MRF reject rates

Under the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS), waste disposal authorities are given a decreasing number of allowances to send biodegradable waste to landfill, which they can then trade, bank or borrow. Every quarter, their performance is assessed by the Environment Agency, which looks at the data each council submits to the government's Wastedataflow database.

During the auditing process, the Environment Agency found that, while most materials recycling facilities produced an amount of waste which was rejected, this was not always being recorded by councils who used them. The information should be recorded under Question 58, which asks councils how many tonnes of material they send to a MRF. This suggested that many councils were reporting a better performance than they had actually achieved.

Because of contamination, the Agency believes that a reject rate of 10.85% would be a typical average.

To look into the problem, the Agency sought detailed information from all 168 English local authorities which use MRFs during 2007/08. The research found that 94 authorities reported reject rates between zero and 5%, of which 32 reported no reject rates at all and 15 reported very low rejects of less than 1%.

The Agency said it believed that every authority using MRFs should be reporting rejects and so in August 2008 warned that it would serve notices for incomplete or inconsistent information – which has lead to gradual improvements.

In the first quarter of 2008/09, the number of local authorities reporting zero reject rates had fallen to 28.

This is expected to fall even further, because the Agency contacted each authority in question to determine the reasons for the zero submission, of which seven agreed to record reject rates from quarter 2 onwards.

However, the figures still show that there is still a big variation in the reject rate reported by councils, with many local authorities not even aware that MRFs recorded reject rates.

Other councils were recording the data but not considering it in the context of question 58, with the remainder indicating that the use of physical sorting to remove contamination prior to transfer to a MRF minimised rejects.

The Environment Agency said that it did not serve notices because local authorities responded to its inquiries and said it would continue to assess reject rate submissions and request further information when it felt it was required.