And, local authorities that offer separate food waste or mixed food and garden waste collections were generally found to have a better recycling performance than those which do not offer such collections.
The report suggests that local authorities have direct control over a number of factors which can influence their recycling performance.
However, all local authorities analysed by WRAP showed “very little difference in recycling rates whatever the dry recycling schemes in operation, whether commingled, two-stream or multi-stream”.
The WRAP report – ‘Analysis of recycling performance and waste arisings in the UK 2012/13’ – looks at the key factors that influence recycling performance rates, as well as quantifying the degree to which these factors actually impact on local authorities’ recycling rates.
It found an association between an increase in weekly residual waste containment capacity from 120 to 240 litres and decreases in recycling rates by 7.9 percentage points.
This is due to decreases in dry recycling yields and increases in residual waste yields, WRAP said, although “no significant relationship” was found between residual waste collection capacity and total waste arisings levels, suggesting that material is likely diverted to other streams such as HWRCs in areas of lower residual capacity.
The containment volume available to a household for residual waste depends on the size of the container provided and the collection frequency, and the WRAP study combines the frequency and container size into a single measure of effective weekly residual containment capacity.
Lower recycling rates were also found to have a connection with householders which use subscription garden waste collections, or no garden waste collections at all.
Furthermore, councils in England which collect PTT plastic at the kerbside were generally found to have higher recycling rates.
Social factors
Overall, factors under the control of local authorities (such as collection frequency and capacity) have a larger influence on recycling performance – contributing to between 39% and 65% of the difference between authorities’ recycling rates – than contextual social factors outside council control, which affect the range of recycling rates by between 16% and 29%.
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Nevertheless, contextual social factors such as higher levels of deprivation in a community are associated with lower recycling rates, while authorities with higher rural populations were found to be associated with higher recycling rates as a result of higher dry, organic and total arisings yield.
For the study, WRAP analysed data for 239 local authorities encompassing waste collection authorities in England, unitary authorities in England and unitary authorities in the UK.
The analysis also included local authorities that provide the same collection service for paper, card, cans, glass and plastic bottles to 80% or more of their households.
In total, 60% of all England and UK authorities with responsibility for collection services were included in the study.
Linda Crichton, head of resource management at WRAP, said: “Recycling rates vary throughout the UK just as they do in other countries, and the reasons for this are complex. They can be within the control of an authority or contextual factors, such as demographics, that are beyond the authority’s control. Being able to quantify the degree to which each impact on recycling is hugely important for an authority, and this report will help make that possible.”
Recycling for its own sake is meaningless. Collecting garden and food waste for example to bump up recycling rates incur high costs not justified by any benefit to the environment. Where installed waste to energy plants should be sized to take in single-bin mixed collections and recycling limited to materials that have a high re-sale value over and above cost of collection. Recycling targets are meaningless.