Corporate report

Progress report on recycling and recovery targets for England 2020

Progress report on recycling and recovery targets for England as set out in Article 11(2) of the Waste Framework Directive 2008

This was published under the 2019 to 2022 Johnson Conservative government

Applies to England

Documents

Details

This report provides an update on progress towards several recycling and recovery targets in England. Although progress has been made on recycling, England has not met the target to recycle 50% of ‘waste from households’ by 2020.

In 2020, the ‘waste from households’ recycling rate was 44.0%, down from 45.5% in 2019. This decrease reflects the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2020 non-hazardous waste construction and demolition target of 70% recovery has been achieved. In 2018, the recovery rate was 93.8%. We will publish the 2019 and 2020 data on non-hazardous construction and demolition waste (including recovery rate) once the information is available.

Regarding future targets on municipal waste recycling rates, the municipal waste indicator is under development. Local authority collected waste is used as a proxy. In 2020 to 2021, 41.4% of local authority collected waste was recycled.

Updates to this page

Published 5 January 2022

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