Recycling has become an everyday activity for most households in the UK, with 85% recycling household items.
As positive as this is, there is an urgent need to improve on the progress made over recent years and this starts by making it easier for households to recycle more.
Whilst recycling is an established norm, with 85% of UK citizens reporting that they regularly recycle, there remains scope for improvement, particularly after the pandemic when the capture rates recorded by the survey[1] have fallen back relative to 2019-2020.
Over half of UK citizens (57%) miss the opportunity to recycle at least one item in their kerbside collection. There is also a need to reduce contamination with almost nine in ten (87%) putting at least one item in the recycling when it is not collected locally.
As in previous waves of the Waste and Resources Action Programme’s (WRAP) recycling tracker, the findings continue to demonstrate the influence of recycling service design - with fewer items being disposed of incorrectly by households with restricted residual waste capacity, food waste collections and multi-stream schemes. However, this wave goes further in exploring the relationship between recycling performance, and satisfaction with services.
There are some key win-wins where better recycling performance and higher resident satisfaction go hand in hand. The provision of food waste recycling collections is associated with higher levels of recycling performance and greater resident satisfaction.
Similarly, the research demonstrates that communications about the service (including guidance on what can and cannot be recycled) is also associated with greater levels of resident satisfaction.
However, the lowest rated aspect of local service provision is clarity on what can and cannot be recycled. With confusion about what can and cannot be recycled being the number one ranking barrier to greater recycling, much work is needed to make checking how to recycle at home common knowledge. Recycling correct items has key implications for local councils, retailers and brands.
There are also some service changes that can lead to improved recycling performance without any reduction in satisfaction. UK citizens rate multi-stream collections, two stream collections and co-mingled collections similarly.
However, the survey shows higher levels of recycling performance (when missed capture and contamination are combined) are associated with multi-stream or two stream collections. It is therefore possible for recycling services to move to a multi-stream or two stream collection without reducing resident satisfaction.
Restricting residual capacity is associated with greater recycling performance and achieves a similar resident satisfaction score to those authorities that have not yet restricted their residual collections. It is therefore possible for local authorities to reduce the capacity of their containers for residual waste and not suffer long term reduction is resident satisfaction.
The exception appears to be changes to the frequency of collection, with the tracker pointing to lower satisfaction among those with residual collections every 3-4 weeks. This may benefit from further research to explore this link in more detail and with larger sample sizes.
The research also highlights that recycling performance and service satisfaction are both lower with communal recycling systems (e.g. flat-based recycling).
There is a comprehensive package of ambitious proposals in the Resource and Waste Strategy for England aimed at achieving greater consistency in collections and driving up recycling – something that WRAP has been working on for several years. They include proposals for all local authorities to collect a consistent range of materials to a minimum service standard. This will play an important role in reducing confusion for householders, enabling clearer labels on packaging, increasing recycling rates and improving material quality, especially when put alongside mandatory weekly food waste collections. Local Authorities should be encouraged by the research findings as they demonstrated that the provision of food waste recycling and communications about what can and can’t be recycled could improve recycling performance and achieve higher levels of resident satisfaction.
WRAPs research also suggests that contamination is largely the result of well-intentioned attempts to recycle, such as label checking fails and incorrect knowledge on what can and cannot be recycled. This is partly because citizens naturally make approximations based on other ‘like’ items (for example I can recycle glass jars therefore I can recycle drinking glasses and Pyrex), but it also results from a lack of, or confusing information.
Consistency with all households being able to recycle the same core set of materials will help reduce this confusion. However, we should not underestimate the role that effective communications about will play. I believe it will lead to citizens and households recycling more of the right materials on every occasion, reducing contamination.
It is therefore important that all local authorities receive the support they need to communicate these changes to their residents, creating a greater understanding amongst citizens about what can and cannot be recycled.
Recycle Now have developed a new toolkit that will be freely available to all local authorities in the UK, providing users with customisable assets that will support greater consistency in recycling communications.
Other useful communication toolkits related to service change and food waste are readily available.
[1] The Recycling Tracker is the largest and longest running survey on recycling attitudes, values and behaviours.
