Disruption to household collections falling

Published yesterday (23 March) for the week commencing 15 March, the figures show 76% of recycling collections are operating as normal, up from 69% the previous week.

Disruptions to garden waste services has also fallen, with 85% operating as normal, up from 74% previously.

The survey added that 2% of garden waste services are still unavailable, which hasn’t changed since the last survey.

Food waste services have improved, with a total of 76% council reporting collections to be operating as normal, which is up from 65% in the last survey.

Figures for residual waste collections remain similar to the last survey, with 78% of councils reporting a normal service, down 1%.

Staff absence

Staff absence continues to be the greatest reported cause for remaining disruptions to collection services, with 49% of councils experiencing absence due to self isolation. This is a slight increase from last week’s figure of 44%.

Absence due to sickness is the second largest cause for disruption, which was reported by 37 of responding local authorities.

This is also a slight increase from the last surveys figure of 31%, where sickness formed the third-largest factor for disruption.

Effects of social distancing is still an issue for 20% of councils, however this has significantly decreased from the 38% that reported it in the previous survey.

Arisings

A “large majority” of councils are still seeing consistently higher volumes of recycling, with 95% stating they are “greater than usual”.

The percentage of authorities reporting normal residual tonnages has also fallen to 10%, compared to 15% in the last survey.

Around 40% of respondents reported garden waste tonnages to be “about the same” as expected this time of year,  which is a slight decrease from 42% in the previous survey. Greater than usual levels of garden waste tonnages are reported by 59% of responding authorities.

Disposal

All landfilling and 93% of Energy from Waste disposal services are operating as normal, which has been a consistent picture since March 2020.

All local authorities reported their Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) to be open, however only 24% said that they were operating normally.