Quantifying the composition of municipal waste

There are five main outputs from this piece of research, all available to download at the bottom of the page:

National Household Waste composition 2017

Key messages:

• Some recyclable materials are still found in household waste, meaning there are opportunities to increase recycling further.
• In the composition of kerbside waste, there has been a decrease in paper and a substantial increase in card. This change is likely to be a result of a decline in the circulation of print media (e.g. newspapers, magazines) and an increase in online-shopping deliveries which tend to be packaged in card. There was an increase in the proportion of food waste and garden waste in the kerbside stream between 2010 and 2017, though food waste has subsequently reduced (see Synthesis of Household Food Waste Compositional Data 2018).

Compositional analysis of Local Authority collected and non-Local Authority collected non-household municipal waste

Key messages:

• An in-depth analysis of non-household municipal waste collected by local authorities indicated that 1.5 billion ‘high profile’ items were discarded in 2017 (coffee cups, drink cans, plastic drink bottles, cotton buds, wet wipes, stirrers, straws) with a combined weight of over 25,000 tonnes

The results presented in this report represent a significant study to understand the composition of LA collected non-household municipal residual waste and Waste Management Company (WMC) collected commercial waste in England.

National municipal waste composition, England 2017

This report presents the composition and arisings estimates for materials in municipal waste produced by both commercial sector businesses and households in England, for the calendar year 2017.