Recycling in numbers

agendaNi takes a look at Northern Ireland’s recycling efforts throughout 2014-15.

The Department of the Environment has recently published Northern Ireland’s Local Authority Collected Municipal Waste Management Statistics for 2014/15. In the year 2014/15 Northern Ireland’s 26 councils were split into three waste management groups. The largest of these groups was arc21. It was home to 53 per cent of the population and 11 council areas including, Belfast, Lisburn and Ballymena. The Southern Waste Management Partnership made up 28 per cent of the population and contained eight council areas including Banbridge, Fermanagh and Newry & Mourne. The North West Regional Waste Management Group represented 18 per cent of the population and was made up of councils including Ballymoney, Derry and Magherafelt.

Throughout Northern Ireland, 1.158 tonnes of household waste is generated per household, 42 per cent of this is sent for recycling with 42.7 per cent heading for landfill. It is a similar story for local authority collected municipal waste, with 951,423 tonnes of waste collected, an increase of 2.9 per cent on last year’s figure, with 41.4 per cent of LAC municipal waste sent for recycling.