England breaks through 40% recycling barrier

But, due to reporting issues, the department has not yet released a break-down of the performance of individual local authorities. This means that councils will have to wait a few more weeks to find out who are the best performers – who have beenpredicted by letsrecycle.com (see letsrecycle.com story).

The figures, which were taken from the governments WasteDataFlow database, show that, at 41.2%, Englands household waste recycling, reuse and composting rate broke through the 40% barrier for the first time. This is 1.5 percentage points higher than in 2009/10, when 39.7% was recycled.

This is lower than the 2.1% and 3.1% annual growth in the preceding two years showing that the rate of growth in recycling and composting continues to decline.

The generation of household waste also continued to decrease between 2009/10 and 2010/11, falling by 0.9% to 23.5 million tonnes. This continues a slowing in a production of waste since 2007/08.

Elsewhere, the figures show that the tonnage of local authority collected waste being sent to landfill decreased by 8.8 between 2009/10 and 2010/11 to 11.4 million tonnes. This continues the decrease of tonnes sent to landfill since 2002/3, however the decrease has been slowing since 2008/09.

Commenting on the figures, environment minister Lord Taylor welcomed how recycling was now a part of peoples daily routines.

He said: Recycling is now part of our everyday lives and were sending less waste to landfill than ever before. This is good news for householders, councils and the environment, but there is still much more we can all do. By all working together to deliver the recycling services local people want and need, we can achieve our ultimate aim of a zero waste economy.

Regions

A regional break down of the figures published alongside the data shows that the East of England continued to have the highest household waste recycling rate at 48.5%. This was followed by the South West (45.7%), East Midlands (45.6%), West Midlands (41.3%) and South East (41.3%). At the other end of the table the regions with the lowest recycling rates were London (at 32.5%) and the North East (35.8%). Also at the lower end of the table were Yorkshire and the Humber (38.6%) the North West (39.6%).

The North East produced the most household waste, a 639kg per household per year, with the least (542kg) produced in the East of England.

Usually Defra would publish alongside the headline findings a breakdown of recycling and composting performance by local authority.

But, the department said: Due to reporting issues we have been unable to produce the usual detailed local authority level data in time for the pre-announced National Statistics release date. We will be publishing this data shortly.

In August, letsrecycle.com predicted that South Oxfordshire would be top of this years league table after it sent over 70% of its waste for reuse, recycling and composting (see letsrecycle.com story) .