The revelation comes amongst the findings of the Department’s Local Authority Collected Municipal Waste Management Statistics report, which indicates that Northern Ireland’s district councils achieved a 41.9% recycling rate for 2014/15.
The ambition to reach 45% was agreed in the Northern Ireland Executive’s Programme for Government, published in March 2012, which outlined the government’s priority action areas up to 2015.
Progress on recycling has been made during that time, with the recycling rate increasing from 38.4% in 2011/12 to its current level, while the overall dependence on landfill has also dropped, with around 42.7% of Northern Ireland’s waste going to landfill in 2014/15, compared to 58% in 2011/12.
Energy
However, an increase of household waste being sent to energy from waste outlets has largely bridged the gap between recycling and landfill, now making up 14.9% of the overall waste treatment total, more than double that of 2011/12. According to the Executive the increasing use of dirty material recovery facilities has contributed to the increase in energy from waste treatment.
What may be of some concern for environment minister Mark H Durkan is that Northern Ireland’s dry recycling rate saw an overall drop in 2014/15, decreasing from 22.3% the previous year to 21.8%. This was offset by a record high for composting in the province, with composting rates increasing from 19% to 20.1%.
Arisings
Elsewhere, the report also outlines a slight overall increase in waste arisings from 814,764 tonnes in 2013/14 to 839,569 tonnes in 2014/15. This still represents an overall drop from the peak waste arisings of 938,726 tonnes in 2006/07.
Of the three large local authority waste management groupings within Northern Ireland SWaMP2008 comprising the eight southern local authorities had the highest household recycling rate at 44.1%. The arc21 group in the east of country was next with 42.4% while the lowest was the northern NWRWMG grouping of seven councils at 37.9%.
Individually, Banbridge district council recorded the highest household recycling rate in 2014/15, at 59.0%. The next highest rates were 52.3% by Magherafelt district council and 50.6% by Antrim borough council.
Compared to the previous year Cookstown district council recorded the largest increase in household recycling rates, up 6.6 percentage points from 42.5% in 2013/14 to 49.1% in 2014/15.
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