Although the Agency has said this does not necessarily mean the UK will run out of landfill capacity, it noted an “urgency” in the need to cut the amount of waste we produce.
The statistics, published in the form of the Waste Data Update 2006, also confirm a significant increase in the proportion of waste being sent to permitted treatment facilities between 2001 and 2006.
While the increase between 2002-03 and 2005 was largely driven by a single plant taking contaminated chemical waste in the North East, the growth during the final year of data largely represents municipal waste being sent for treatment.
The six year period represented in the data also saw a quadrupling in throughputs at MRFs, with the facilities dealing with five million tonnes more waste per annum.
Similarly, inputs to licensed composting facilities increased by five times between 2000 and 2006, reaching a figure of 2.3 million tonnes in the last year of the new data published.
2006 saw incinerator capacity top eight million tonnes for the first time, a landmark that the report largely attributes to the opening of new municipal waste incinerators in the South East.
However, it also raised issues the data had brought to light relating to incinerator capacity being less fully utilised than previously believed, with particular concerns at co-incineration facilities such as cement kilns and animal carcass incinerators.
As expected, the data indicates a reduced reliance on landfill, with the period 2001 to 2006 seeing more than 15.5 million tonnes of waste being diverted away from landfill and into recycling facilities.
The most marked regional differences revealed by the data relate to landfill capacity, with the estimated remaining time for tipping ranging from 11.6 years in sites in Yorkshire and Humber to just 3.2 years in London.
While sites in the West Midlands and North East are also shown to have in excess of 10 years of disposal life remaining, the report claims that the landfill market represented by London along with the East of England and the South-East has around seven years of tipping space left.
In a statement, the EA said: “These are projections and do not necessarily mean that we will physically run out of landfill space in the next few years.
“However it highlights the urgency that still exists to reduce waste production, promote waste recovery and develop new infrastructure to support this,” it added.
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