MSW Sent to Landfill Falls to 18m tonnes : Defra Statistics UK RDF Exports Soar as Recycling Rates Stagnate

Household waste generation rises by 3.3% to 26.8m tonnes, RDF exports hit nearly 2.4m tonnes and recycling rate creeps up to 44.8%, according to UK government statistical compendium for waste and resources.

Published today by the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the second issue of the annual Digest of Waste and Resource Statistics is a compendium of statistics on a range of waste and resource areas.

It is based on data published mainly by Defra, the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the Environment Agency, the Office for National Statistics and Eurostat.

Below is a summary of the findings.

Domestic Material Consumption measures the amount of materials used in the economy

In 2013, Domestic Material Consumption (DMI) was 588 million tonnes – a slight increase from 2012, this was driven by increases in the extraction of biomass. However this represents a significant decrease from the 755 million tonne consumed in 2004.

In 2013 DMC represented 9.2 tonnes per capita. This compared to the DMC per capita in the EU of highest in Finland at 32.6 tonnes per capita and lowest in Spain at 8.2 tonnes.

Waste arising from households in the UK increased by 3.3% between 2013 and 2014 from 25.9 million tonnes to 26.8 million, but the 2014 tonnage is a decrease of 0.6% since 2010.

The tonnage of MSW sent to landfill fell to 18 million tonnes in 2013, compared to 25 million tonnes in 2010.

9 million tonnes of the MSW sent to landfill in 2013 was biodegradable.

The annual rate of ‘waste from households’ recycling for 2014 was 44.8%, marginally up on the 44.2% achieved in 2013. It is up by 3.0% points since the 2010 calendar year.

15 million tonnes of food and drink was wasted in the food chain in 2013. This is equivalent to around one third of the 41 million tonnes of food that is bought annually in the UK.

The highest proportion of this waste in the food chain was wasted in households, with 7 million tonnes being thrown away in the UK in 2013, or just under half of the 15 million tonnes that is thrown away.

Of the 7 million tonnes of household food and drink waste, 4.2 million tonnes was avoidable, 1.2 million tonnes was possibly avoidable and just 1.6 million tonnes was unavoidable.

Exports of Refuse Derived Fuel have increased from 9000 tonnes in 2010 to nearly 2.4 million tonnes in 2014

Local Authorities dealt with 900,000 incidents of fly-tipping in 2014/15 in England, ranging in size from single black bag to tipper truck loads.

66% of all fly-tips in England in 2014/15 were household waste. This was nearly 590 thousand incidents, one for every 40 households.

The full Digest can be downloaded from the Defra website.

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