Do you know where your rubbish goes when you put it in the bin? Most of us put what we can in the recycling, then try not to think about it. But after it leaves your hands, London’s waste has a life of its own. Some goes on a night train to Bristol, to be burned in incinerators, while more than a million tonnes a year is sent abroad, as far away as China.
While our city often pats itself on the back for green policies such as Ulez and clean air initiatives, we’re the worst area in the country for recycling. Recent Government figures show that in 2022-23, only 32.7 per cent of household waste in the capital went to recycling centres — the lowest of any region in England, and far below the national average of 43 per cent. It’s also well below a mayoral target of 45 per cent by 2025, which the city looks almost certain to miss.
In addition, five of the top 10 worst areas in England for recycling are in London. Tower Hamlets (17.7 per cent) is the worst, followed by Wandsworth (22.4 per cent), Lewisham (23 per cent), Kensington and Chelsea (23.1 per cent), then the joint Western Riverside body (24.3 per cent), covering areas including Hammersmith and Fulham, and Lambeth.
Everyone knows how important rubbish collection is. After just two weeks of strikes last September, there were huge piles of waste on the streets of Tower Hamlets, and independent contractors had to be called out to prevent the risk of fire — while those with longer memories will remember Trafalgar Square filled with black rubbish bags in the Seventies. But few of us know where our rubbish actually goes after it gets collected.
While you might assume the lorries go to landfill, in fact, barely any London rubbish goes to the dump. Instead, 65.2 per cent of it — the highest rate in the country — is incinerated. The pollution that comes from burning rubbish is just one issue the capital isn’t solving.
“The problem with London is that in a massive metropolis you have a gigantic waste challenge,” says Oliver Franklin-Wallis, author of the book Wasteland. He explains that the average Briton produces about 1.3 kilos of waste every day, and that’s harder to deal with in cities. “We live in very dense urban areas in blocks of flats and high rises, where people aren’t able to do things like compost bins, so cities have always been the hardest places for waste collection.”
Even as he details our waste problems Franklin-Wallis says recycling figures don’t tell the full story, because they “don’t actually measure what’s being recycled, they just measure what’s been received by recycling plants. Recycling’s dirty secret is that we don’t actually know how much of it happens.” So the problem may be even bigger than we think.
Franklin-Wallis says that London, like the rest of the UK, could do much better than it is with more help from the powers that be. “Some of the big problems that we have at the moment are rooted in failed policy,” he says. The Government passed the Environment Bill in 2021, but since then, they’ve been “backpedalling and kicking the problem into the long grass over and over again”, he thinks.
Ideas like a “deposit return scheme” which would have charged people for using plastic bottles, then given them the money back if they reused them, have been delayed — Britain currently uses 13 billion plastic bottles a year. Similarly, an Extended Producer Responsibility law, which would have made producers pay the costs of managing the waste packaging they create, has also stalled. Instead, Rishi Sunak spoke out about councils with “seven bins” last year, while doing little to change Britain’s waste issues.
One major issue is that lots of London’s waste is “offshored” and sent elsewhere. In his book, Franklin-Wallis explains that night trains full of west London’s rubbish are sent out to Bristol and elsewhere to be burnt — costing large sums, and exporting pollution elsewhere.
There are also several incinerators in London, including Bermondsey and Edmonton, which mean electricity for the national grid, but carbon in the atmosphere. Franklin-Wallis says that lots of them are part of Private Finance Initiative contracts which often compel councils to keep sending waste to incinerators, when they could be focusing on improving their recycling figures instead. London’s waste goes in many directions: to the east, in places like Tilbury Docks, old landfills are slowly leaking into the Thames. We also put some waste on ships and send it abroad, and some discarded clothes end up on beaches in Ghana.
Even when it gets to recycling plants, waste doesn’t always get reused. At the plants, including one off the Old Kent Road in Southwark, teams sort out what can be recycled and what can’t. If there is too much food debris on packaging, it has to be thrown away — so clean your plastic before putting it in the bin. Drinking glasses can’t be recycled with glass wine bottles, because of the difference in melting temperatures. A recent survey showed that 80 per cent of people don’t know what should go in the recycling, while the myriad rules in different areas don’t help.
Things can be improved if there is the will to do it; London has long been at the forefront of waste management over the years. In the 1850s, sewage systems which emptied straight into the Thames led to the “Great Stink”. In response, Joseph Bazalgette created a better system — we still see “stink pipes” sticking out of pavements. In a modern adaptation, the new Thames Tideway super sewer hopes to combat the problem of “fatbergs”. It will open next year.
Rubbish, of course, is a different beast, not helped in London by the many variation between boroughs, all of which deal with their own waste, meaning people can live on the same street and have different bins.
According to recent analysis by the University of Manchester, the UK has at least 39 different bin regimes across 391 local authorities. Bromley is the best London borough for recycling, at 48.7 per cent, but it borders Lewisham, one of the worst.
“At the moment, there’s big variation in what some councils collect. And that isn’t helpful in terms of providing communications and consistent messages for householders,” says Jacob Hayler, executive director of the Environmental Services Association, the trade body for the recycling and waste treatment industry in the UK.
Hayler also argues that comparing London with other parts of the UK isn’t entirely fair, as density and poverty means that cities are often worse than elsewhere. But some cities do better than London: Berlin has an estimated recycling rate of 54 per cent, while Greater Manchester also recycles around half of its waste.
In any case, Hayler knows that recycling could be better in London. He thinks that the Government should raise a plastic packaging tax, which would incentivise companies to use plastic from recycling plants. He also thinks the authorities should enforce the rules better, explaining that recycling firms who stick by the rules are often undermined by fly tippers. Last year, Brent was the worst place for fly-tipping in the UK, with 35,000 incidents.
It isn’t all bad news: Londoners produce less waste than other areas. Each London household produces nearly a tonne of waste per year on average (970kg), less than the national average. And the UK has improved at recycling since 2000, when we only used to recycle 10 per cent of our waste. That figure is now much higher, but seems to have stalled at the low 40 per cent mark.
While many of us prefer not to think about waste, it’s a big part of our response to climate change. Franklin-Wallis points out that 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions are down to waste management and another 10 per cent to food waste — together, more than all of shipping and aviation combined.
So what is the answer to our recycling problems? Franklin-Wallis says the capital needs to question the need for energy plants and incinerators in the city. He also argues we should renegotiate contracts which compel boroughs to incinerate waste, when it could be recycled.
“It’s absolutely insane to me that we are exporting so much of our waste from London when there could be recycling infrastructure in Greater London to keep our waste here and also to reuse it in a circular way,” he says.
“There are plenty of businesses looking for recycled plastics, there are plenty of innovative fashion businesses who are trying to buy recycled cotton and textiles to make clothing, but because there isn’t the market for it, they are trying to buy it from the other side of the world. If we were to rebuild our infrastructure for a circular economy, not only would we get a cleaner environment, but our businesses will thrive as a result.”
London could also have simpler recycling systems. Last week, recycling minister Robbie Moore announced a new system for the UK, which will see the same materials collected from homes, workplaces and schools. Gary Lewis, CEO of Resourcify, a company which helps businesses with recycling, thinks we should do something similar, simplifying “convoluted infrastructure that varies drastically between boroughs”, which he says would help companies in particular.
Another answer is that we all need to produce less waste too: the capital creates seven million tonnes of waste each year, which needs to go somewhere. Do you really need to buy that plastic bottle? Franklin-Wallis argues that a big part of the solution is “meaningful relationships” with objects, and throwing fewer things away. That, with better laws, could mean better recycling in London.
