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 2021/22 statistics on household waste sent for recycling, reuse and composting reveal that the rate for the Lancashire-12 area of 41.2% was below the North West rate of 45.8%, and the England rate of 42.5%. The Lancashire-12 percentage fell by -3.4 percentage points (pp) over the previous year.
At the district/unitary level, recycling, reuse and composting rates varied between lows of just 30.4% in Blackburn with Darwen to 47.5% in West Lancashire.
Seven of the authorities in the Lancashire-14 area saw small decreases in their recycling rates over the past 12 months. In Blackpool the 14.2 percentage point (pp) increase in rate of waste recycled was the 2nd highest in England.
Collected household waste per person
Hyndburn had the 9th lowest figure in England for household waste generation per head at just 289.5 kg. The top five authorities were all London boroughs, the best being Lambeth at 226 kg.
Waste sent to landfill
In 2021/22, 8.1% of 'local authority collected' waste for England was sent to landfill (up +0.3 percentage points from 7.8% in 2020/21). For the North West region, the rate was higher at 9.1% (down just -0.1 pp from 9.2% in 2020/21).
The percentage of municipal waste that was sent to landfill in 2021/22 was 34.6% for the Lancashire-12 area, 17.9% for Blackpool and 6.0% for Blackburn with Darwen. Blackpool's figure was 13th highest out of 123 collection/disposal authorities and Lancashire-12 5th. The figure for Lancashire-12 was higher than in the previous two years.
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 2021/22
Source: Defra: ENV18 - Local authority collected waste: annual results tables
(LA_and_Regional_Spreadsheet_202122, Table_2a)
Fly-tipping
A total of 1,091,019 fly-tipping incidents were dealt with by local authorities in England in the year to March 2022, which represents a yearly decrease of 4.2%. The results for Lancashire authorities reveal quite a volatile pattern with some very large increases and decreases from one year to the next. For the Lancashire-12 area, there were 24,609 reported incidents of fly-tipping during the year to March 2022.
Recycling specialists in Lancashire
A selection of recycling specialists is included in the full report.
Further analysis
Household waste recycling, municipal waste and fly-tipping (2021/22) (PDF 236 KB)
Page updated April 2023.