England sees recycling rates fall, threatening EU target for UK
England’s recycling rates have fallen from 44.8% in 2014 to 43.9% in 2015, according to government figures.The amount of household rubbish sent to recycling sites increased for over a decade, then became static for three years prior to the fall. The decline has been blamed on cuts to local authorities and to recycling programme Wrap. It is now likely that all of the UK will miss the European Union target of recycling 50% of household waste by 2020. Suez, a major waste company, has called for a tax on packaging manufacturers to boost recycling rates.

This publication covers annual final estimates for waste collected by local authorities in England and the regions. These statistics are based on data submitted by all local authorities in England to WasteDataFlow on the waste they collect and manage.

The methodology and recycling explainer documents give background and context to this statistical notice, accompanying datasets and the waste and recycling measures they present.

There is also a further historical note on the definition of local authority collected waste relating to earlier releases.

The February 2017 ad hoc release on this page related to data for April-September 2016. The data was provisional not having been through full data quality assurance. They are not official statistics. Data was not included for local authorities where this has either not yet been submitted or had not been through initial data quality assurance checks. This provisional release was replaced by the “Statistics on waste managed by local authorities in England 2016 to 2017” National statistics publication.

The datasets associated with these publications can be found here ENV18 - Local authority collected waste: annual results tables