The UK Government‘‘s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has published the second provisional set of estimates from the Department‘‘s 2007/8 survey of municipal waste in England. These provisional results incorporate the second quarter of the financial year (July to September 2007) and are based on information supplied by local authorities to WasteDataFlow.

Key findings

To minimise the effects of seasonal fluctuations, comparisons are made between the year April 2006 to March 2007 and the year October 2006 to September 2007, i.e. encompassing the provisional results for the quarter July to September 2007.

Total municipal waste changed little in the year to end September 2007, decreasing from 29.1 million tonnes to 29.0 million tonnes, or 0.3%. A similar small decrease in total household waste was observed, from 25.8 to 25.7 million tonnes. Less waste was sent to landfill, decreasing from 16.9 to 16.1 million tonnes.

There was an increase in the household recycling rate, from the average rate 30.9% between April 2006 and March 2007 to 33.2% between October 2006 and September 2007. The average residual household waste per head decreased from 353kg per head between April 2006 and March 2007 to 340 kg per head between October 2006 and September 2007.

Notes

Household waste includes household collection rounds (‘‘bin‘‘ waste), other household collections such as bulky waste collections, waste from services such as litter collections, waste from civic amenity sites and wastes separately collected for recycling or composting through bring/drop off schemes, kerbside schemes and at civic amenity sites. Municipal waste is that which comes under the control of the Local Authority and includes household waste and other wastes collected by a waste collection authority or its agents, such as municipal parks and gardens waste, beach cleansing waste, commercial or industrial waste, and waste resulting from the clearance of fly-tipped materials.

The amount of waste sent for reuse, recycling and composting is that which is accepted by the reprocessor. As such it excludes any recycling rejects that occur during collection, sorting or further treatment. Waste diverted for recycling from the residual stream by further processing is included in the recycling tonnages.

Limitations of the data

These data are provisional as not all returns have completed full validation and returns to WasteDataFlow can be revised by local authorities during the scheme year. There are also seasonal effects on waste arisings and management which means care needs to be taken when assessing trends. Final figures will be released in the annual National Statistics release in November 2008.

For July to September 2007, all 394 local authorities submitted data to WasteDataFlow but at the time the data were downloaded for this release, returns from 7 local authorities had not completed validation. The unvalidated returns have a small overall impact on the statistics, accounting for 1% of the estimated total municipal waste.