On the whole, councils in the UK continue to strike the right chord when it comes to improving their waste management services. Charles Newman warms up his vocal chords to sing their praises

The Local Authority League Table is sponsored by

 UK League Table chart ->

Waste Collection Authority Performance chart ->

This is the third successive year that Resource has compiled its league table of local authority (LA) performance based on the amount of residual waste per person in each area. Although we recognise the critical role of recycling, etc, it’s the amount of material left for disposal that reflects our progress towards zero waste and captures attempts to minimise waste. In a world of finite resources; the long-term logic is that we cannot keep discarding material. And for the third year running, we continue to see a significant reduction in the amount of residual waste. In 2010/11, the UK average was 269.2 kilogrammes (kg) per capita, down from 284kg the previous year. At a time that the UK (temporarily) emerged from recession, the total amount of waste generated per person also still fell from 467.5kg to 456.3kg, while predictably recycling continued to increase.

Perhaps controversially, we still choose to count energy from waste as residual. While obtaining energy might be better than nothing in the short term, again in the longer term, we believe the loss of material is largely incompatible with sustainability. No doubt many in this industry will argue with this and we recognise there are pros as well as cons. It will continue to be one of the hotly contested issues throughout this decade.

Breaking down performance, there are some notable successes that deserve closer scrutiny. First and foremost, at a national level, the average improvement of councils in Wales is miles ahead of everywhere else. For the first time since we began ranking according to residual arising, Wales is ahead of England, 262 and 264 kg per capita respectively, with Northern Ireland (304kg) and Scotland (315.5kg) a little way back. However, it is the level of improvement in Wales that really catches the eye, where residual waste per capita has fallen by over 30kg in a single year, more than double that of any other country.