Britain to get recycling standards – finally

I was at an environmental training day for a local school last week. I did the climate bit, and then a council officer from the waste team did the bit about recycling. She spent her entire time answering questions about what could and could not be recycled. Plastic bottles? Yes. Plastic anything else, no.

Yes, including yoghurt pots – only bottles here. Yes, including meat trays – only bottles here.

One reason for the confusion is that many staff worked in Luton but lived elsewhere, and the rules were different. Where they lived, you could recycle plastic trays and yoghurt pots. And so it goes all across the country. Things that are recycled in one district might not be collected in the next town over. Packaging will tell you if it can be recycled, but not if your local council wants it. ‘Widely recycled’ is the best the manufacturers can do. Likewise with food waste. Some collect it, some don’t.

National standards have been an obvious thing to do for years. Recycling rates hit a plateau ten years ago, and we’ve been waiting a decade for any kind of leadership on the issue. Finally, last week we got confirmation that there will be national standards in place by 2026. “Across England, people will be able to recycle the same materials, no longer needing to check what their council will accept for recycling.”

It’s worth noting the ‘across England’ there. This is the national government making the announcement, but the regions have their own plans. Wales has invested significantly in recycling as part of their circular economy plan, and has a recycling rate of 56% compared to England’s 44%.

It’s also interesting that the government appears to blame the EU at the top of their policy announcement. Recycling rates plateaued, they acknowledge, and “To address this, we will repeal EU-derived waste collection requirements.” This is typical of the Conservatives, though in reality almost all our immediate European neighbours have higher recycling rates, with Italy not far off double our rates. It’s nonsense to suggest that EU requirements have held us back, but hey, we’ve got to maintain the delusion that Brexit was a good idea somehow.

In order to reach these new national standards, the government has studied the top performing councils and tried to apply best practice. There will be some flexibility around how it is delivered, with a preference for mixed kerbside collection, rather than lots of bins to sort waste into. All councils will have to provide weekly food waste collection too, potentially for use in anaerobic digestion.

What remains to be seen is if and how the government will support local councils to provide these guaranteed services. There are reasons why places like Luton offer what they do, and why some places are able to provide more services. There are unanswered questions about how anyone is going to pay for weekly collections that they had already ruled out as unaffordable because of government budget cuts. The whole sector needs investment, including in new markets for recycling. Does anyone want it? Where will it go? We need to work harder to close the loop and do more of the processing locally.

Still, these are common sense measures that are at least ten years overdue, and I’m pleased to see them. Now, only three years to wait until I can recycle my yoghurt pots and plastic trays, like they do already down the road in St Albans.