REFUSE REFLECTIONS: The UK has a new household recycling rate: 44.5%.
That is down from 44.6% the year before, which was up from 44.1% the year before that. I appreciate this is thrilling stuff. Please try to contain yourselves.
More seriously, the UK household recycling rate was 46.0% in 2019. Five years and an impressive quantity of policy announcements, consultations, acronyms and coloured bins later, it is 44.5%.
The obvious conclusion is that the UK needs to recycle more. It probably does. But I have another question for you all: What, exactly, are we trying to make go up?
The recycling rate is so familiar that we rarely stop to consider what it measures. Higher is good. Lower is bad. Somewhere around 45-50% tends to earn a disappointed expression and moaning in the Daily Mail that recycling is pointless.
The calculation is refreshingly simple: Divide the tonnes prepared for reuse, recycled or composted by the tonnes of waste collected. That tells us something useful about what happens after waste is created, but rather less about whether we are becoming “circular”.
Consider two imaginary households.
Household A generates 100kg of waste and recycles 50kg – i.e. a respectable 50% recycling rate.
Household B buys less, wastes less food, repairs things and refills where it can. It generates only 60kg of waste and recycles 27kg, giving it a 45% recycling rate.
According to our favourite scoreboard, Household A is winning. The waste hierarchy may wish to lodge an appeal.
This is not a criticism of the statisticians. The recycling rate does exactly what it says on the tin, assuming the tin is recycled and not counted through IBA (more on that later).
The problem comes when a recycling metric becomes shorthand for circularity.
Some of the most circular things happen before anything becomes waste. Prevent waste and the percentage may barely move. Use less material in a pack and the headline figure does not reward it. Refill something 20 times and the recycling rate remains uninterested until you finally throw it away.
Repair a washing machine and, statistically speaking, you have committed the terrible offence of not throwing it away yet.
Even the weather can lend a hand. Defra’s methodology warns that garden waste can have a marked effect on recycling rates. An enthusiastic growing season can therefore move the number without the UK undergoing a circular-economy revolution.
Then there is incinerator bottom ash metal.
Around 221,000 tonnes of metal recovered after incineration counted towards England’s waste-from-households recycling figure in 2024, adding roughly one percentage point to the rate.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. If metal is recovered from ash and actually recycled, recognising it is perfectly reasonable.
It does, however, produce a wonderfully British statistical journey.
Buy a can.
Throw away can.
Burn can.
Dig can out of ash.
Recycling rate = improved. It’s always seemed bizarre to me, that poor consumer behaviour still leads to recycling. It’s not wrong, just feels odd.
Meanwhile, the reusable container quietly completing its twentieth trip around the system is still waiting for someone to notice.
Perhaps 44.5% is not a bad number. It’s just not necessarily measuring what we really need it to anymore.
Which brings us, eventually, to the Circular Economy Growth Plan. I say eventually because who knows what might, eventually, happen with that.
It was due in early 2026. Early 2026 came and went. In May, more than 50 businesses and organisations called for its publication. In June, government said it would be published “soon”. Asked again in September, Defra said it would outline its next steps “shortly”.
At this rate, “it’s coming” as a response has been used more times than a glass milk bottle by the milkman.
The delay is significant because businesses cannot invest in infrastructure or plan around a strategy that has yet to appear. It also postpones an equally important decision: How success will be measured.
Government has already acknowledged the issue. The Environmental Improvement Plan says progress indicators are being developed through the Growth Plan. Good. If the ambition has moved beyond waste management and towards circularity, the measurement needs to move with it.
That does not mean ditching the recycling rate. We still need to know how much material entering the waste system is returned to productive use rather than lost to disposal. The recycling rate simply needs company.
The Growth Plan should introduce a small headline circularity scoreboard alongside it. One number would be too blunt and could create a magnificent new collection of perverse incentives.
It should answer three questions:
- How much virgin material do we consume?
- How long do products and materials remain in use?
- How much material value is lost throughout the system?
Measures of waste generated per person, reuse and repair, secondary-material use and material lost from productive use would sit underneath.
Call it a circularity score. Call it Dave if that gets the thing published. The name matters less than the principle.
If the UK uses fewer virgin resources, keeps products and materials in use for longer and generates less waste, we ought to see that progress somewhere prominent. Likewise, if the recycling percentage rises alongside material consumption and waste generation, we should resist declaring victory because one number has acquired a nicer-looking decimal place.
The 44.5% figure tells us UK household recycling has barely moved and remains below its 2019 level. It does not tell us whether the UK is becoming circular.
For that, we need to measure what happens before the bin as well as after it. The best tonne of waste is not always the tonne we recycle. Sometimes it is the tonne that never became waste at all.
Until next time,
Keep it sorted.
The Waste Whisperer
Register for free to comment