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TPA Research Compiles Collection Statistics

22 February 2011

Waste services rendered by councils are a direct assessment of their performance by the residents in terms of waste and environment management. And with increasing targets and waste collection regulations imposed by the EU Landfill Directive, the local councils until recently came under immense pressure to separate waste at the time of collection. Now this task has been passed on to the taxpayers. A recent research conducted by the Tax Payers Alliance throws light on the number of bins residents are required to collect and sort their rubbish into. If it's a single bin of recyclable materials for some councils other councils require their residents to collect and segregate materials in to more than five different bins, a task often explained in a detailed leaflet on how they are required to separate waste. Further, some of these regulations are quite stringent and exacting with some local authorities imposing fines of up to £100 on those who fail to comply with the rules.

The research came up with some very interesting statistics like the average number of bins the UK residents usually sort their rubbish into accompanied by the council tax increase for the years spanning 2000-01 to 2010-11. For instance, the council that collects the highest number of bins is Newcastle-under-Lyme with a total of 9 different bins, where the number is equivalent to the 'type' of bin as opposed to the maximum number of containers provided for a single 'waste stream' and shows a total increase of 55 percent in council tax. Further, the average number of bins collected in England is 4, Scotland is 4, Wales is 5 and Northern Ireland is 3. The research also highlights the fact that not all councils provide containers to separate rubbish, it is in most cases left to the residents to buy bins/bags to collect and separate waste.

The research was compiled on the basis of information gathered through Freedom of information requests and refers to data available on the councils websites.

Krishna Buddhiraju