Local Authority Waste & Recycling Magazine
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Waste Handling 24 Local Authority Waste & Recycling August 2015 Which councils are most carbon-conscious with waste? The UK's first local authority waste management carbon league table has found a significant variation in performance between regions. Chris Hoy, Simon Gandy & Adam Read reflect on why some regions are doing better than others Our new local authority waste management carbon league table which we have generated at Ricardo-AEA combines tonnage data from WasteDataFlow with carbon emission factors for each of the fates. Using this, we can look at the individual contributions different materials/fates make to the overall figures, or how results vary by authority or region. Graph 1 shows how the UK nations and English regions perform, in terms of carbon emissions per tonne of waste managed. The red diamonds on the chart shows the Average Emission Factor (AEF) and the columns indicate the relative contribution from each O Government Office Regions (and England as a whole) Graph 1. Government office regions " North East England has the best carbon performance of the regions " Graph 2 meanwhile focusses on South West England, a mid-ranking region according to Graph 1. An early observation is that councils that use recovery (light blue) rather than landfill (dark blue) for their residual waste are grouped together at the top of the list – in other words, left of the plot – in terms of AEF. of the main management fates (reuse, recycling, organic, recovery and landfill). The purple circles show, on the right-hand axis, the traditional league table metric, namely the weight percentage of waste reused, recycled or composted/digested (%RRC). The results indicate that North East England has – by a fair margin – the best carbon performance of the regions, thanks largely to its uniquely low level of waste going to landfill with residual waste mostly going to incineration instead. The next best is Wales, but the bars show that they achieve their position in a quite different way, with high levels of recycling and reuse that offset the relatively high landfill contribution.