Local authority municipal waste management: July to September 2020

These figures are based on provisional data which is published quarterly, with final data for the financial year published annually.

The period July to September 2020 was during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic (see additional information below for more details).

October 2019 to September 2020

• 64.6% of waste was reused/recycled/composted, a slight increase from the year ending September 2019.

July to September 2020

• 68% of municipal waste was reused/recycled/composted, a 2 percentage point increase on the same quarter of 2019.
• 415,000 tonnes of municipal waste were generated, a 4% increase on the same quarter of 2019.

Note

The period July to September 2020 was during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The pandemic caused disruption in the collection of local authority waste during 2020-21 that has caused anomalies in the quarterly datasets. For example, less waste was collected by local authorities in Quarter 1 2020-21 than a typical year owing to the restrictions or suspension of some services including Household Waste Recycling Centres, street cleansing, bulky waste, commercial and green waste collections. In contrast, more waste was collected by local authorities in Quarter 2 2020-21 than in a typical year as a consequence of these services fully resuming. However it is too early to understand the scale of the impacts of the pandemic to the overall household and local authority municipal waste annual datasets. Changes in COVID-19 restrictions are likely to continue to impact on local authority municipal waste data for more recent quarters, and these will be considered in future releases.