UK household recycling crosses 40% for first time in 2010

LONDON (Scrap Monster): Household recyling in United Kingdom has crossed 40% for the first time in 2010,Rochford district council and South Oxfordshire district council topped the recycling league tables, The Guardian reported.

The two councils came top with recycling, reuse and composting rates of 65.79% and 65.11% respectively, with Ashford borough council bottom of the rankings with a rate of just 14%. The average recycling rate for English councils was 41.2% between April 2010 and March 2011, up from 39.7% the year before. Recycling rates have been nudging up annually in the past decade but the rate of progress been begun to slow since 2008, a trend that continued last year.

The EU Waste Framework Directive requires the United Kingdom to recycle, compost or reuse 50% of waste from households by 2020. The UK government has been looking at a series of measures to reduce waste, including charging people who fail to recycle their rubbish and, in parts of the country, reducing weekly bin collections to fortnightly. The UK still produces more household waste per head of population than many of its European neighbours, with an average of 449kg per year, compared to 406kg for the European average. Analysis of the new data from the Department for the Environment, food and rural affairsshows that 231 municipalities increased their recycling rates, but 40 stayed the same and 87 got worse.