But disclosing details of an Environment Agency survey of 80 sites in England and Wales on Monday, the minister said that there were some MRFs having to send back as much as a quarter of material taken in.
The minister was answering a written question from Tory MP Michael Gove, a question concerning the proportion of household rubbish collected for recycling that is not subsequently recycled.
The figures come from the year 2005/06, when 6.87 million tonnes of household waste was collected for recycling, with around one million tonnes being processed through MRFs.
In his answer to Mr Gove, Mr Bradshaw said: “Analysis by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, based on a range of data sources, suggests that a conservative estimate of the amount of household waste collected for recycling which is not recycled, is around 5 to 10%.”
Contamination
In WRAP research carried out last year, a survey of 25 local authorities using MRFs found contamination limits set by MRF contractors for material to be accepted ranged between 7% and 15%. Loads delivered that were above this limit were rejected and a cost was incurred by the collection authority delivering the material.
The WRAP survey found that 10 of the authorities had set no performance criteria for their MRF operators, but those that did had processing efficiency targets based on the percentage of input material processed ranging between 85% and 100%, with “efficiency targets being more stringent for two stream materials”.
Data reporting
As he revealed the rejection rate figures this week, Mr Bradshaw stressed the legal requirements for local authorities to specify the amount of waste collected for recycling that is subsequently rejected when making their quarterly data submissions to the government's WasteDataFlow database.
This included both the waste rejected by MRFs and waste rejected “at the gate of the reprocessor”, he said.
Register for free to comment