Household recycling, municipal waste and fly-tipping

Summary

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) publishes waste and recycling statistics. Please note that the definition of 'household waste' sent for recycling, which is produced for each financial year and analysed in this report, differs from the narrower 'waste from households' sent for recycling definition, which was introduced by Defra in 2014. Statistics relating to the narrower definition are produced by calendar year.

Household waste sent for recycling, reuse or composting

The 2023/24 statistics on household waste sent for recycling, reuse and composting reveal that the rate for the Lancashire-12 area of 41.5% was below both the North West rate of 45.3%, and the England rate of 42.3%. The Lancashire-12 percentage fell by 1.3 percentage points (pp) over the previous year.

At the district/unitary level, recycling, reuse and composting rates varied between lows of just 27.1% in Blackburn with Darwen to 45.0% in West Lancashire.

Only seven of the authorities in the Lancashire-14 area saw improvements in their recycling rates over the past 12 months. Ribble Valley was 2.1 percentage points (pp) higher. Several districts saw larger falls in their rates with 2.7 pp in Chorley and 2.1 pp in South Ribble lower.

Collected household waste per person

Hyndburn had the 16^th lowest figure in England for household waste generation per head at just 235.1 kg. The top five authorities were all London boroughs, the best being Lambeth at 203.3 kg.

Waste sent to landfill

In 2023/24, 5.5% of 'local authority collected' waste for England was sent to landfill (down -1.8 percentage points from 7.3% in 2022/23).

The percentage of municipal waste that was sent to landfill in 2023/24 was 33.8% for the Lancashire-12 area, 15.6% for Blackpool and 1.6% for Blackburn with Darwen. Blackpool's figure was 7^th highest out of 117 collection/disposal authorities and Lancashire-12 3^rd.

Energy from waste

The Microsoft Power BI slide below tracks the replacement of landfill as the main method of disposal by other methods: Recycling, composting and reuse; Incineration with Energy from Waste (EfW); and Incineration without Energy from Waste (EfW). This is for years beginning in 2000/01 and is for England and the North West Region only. This lengthy time-series is not available for local authority statistics, but we have included the data points beginning in 2014/15 for the Lancashire-12 area, Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool. 

Figure (a). Management of Local Authority Collected Waste 2000/01 to 2022/23

 

Source: Defra: ENV18 - Local authority collected waste: annual results tables
(LA_and_Regional_Spreadsheet_202223, Table_2a)

Fly-tipping

A total of 1,152,617 fly-tipping incidents were dealt with by local authorities in England in the year to March 2024, which represents a yearly increase of 6%. For the Lancashire-12 area, there were 26,270 reported incidents of fly-tipping during the year to March 2024.

Recycling specialists in Lancashire 

A selection of recycling specialists is included in the full report.

Page updated November 2025.