The Future of Waste in Essex
Last year (2010-11) in Braintree we produced a
massive 57,102 tonnes of household waste -
that's on average just under 1 tonne per
household. So what happened to all that rubbish? Well,
with your help:
15,290 tonnes were recycled - that
includes the materials you put out in your clear sacks
for recycling and all the materials you took to your local
recycling centres.
15,584 tonnes were composted - that's all the
garden waste and food waste you put out in your green bins.
That gave us a recycling rate of 54.1%, an
increase over the previous year (2009/10) which was just under
50%.
But this still means that 26,228 tonnes of waste
were sent to landfill.
Whilst our recycling rate has improved each year, we all need to
do more. Sending untreated waste to landfill is not a
sustainable way of managing waste and European and national law now
requires local authorities to significantly reduce the amount of
biodegradable waste going to landfill. Councils across Essex
have therefore developed a
Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy for dealing with
waste in the future. This will mean lots more recycling,
waste minimisation and the use of new treatment processes such as
Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) and
Anaerobic Digestion (AD) to replace landfill.