Recycling & waste
Do we recycle enough?
Loading recycling and fly-tipping figures from DEFRA…
Leeds has never caught the England average
The share of household waste sent for reuse, recycling or composting each financial year. Leeds climbed through the early 2010s, then plateaued in the high thirties — several points below the national average, which has itself been stuck around 42–44% for a decade.
Landfill is over — but not because of recycling
The share of Leeds' municipal waste sent to landfill. It collapsed from two-thirds to almost nothing after the city's Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility opened in 2016 — non-recycled waste is now mostly burned for energy rather than buried.
Fly-tipping: down from the peak, rising again
Fly-tipping incidents recorded by Leeds City Council each year. DEFRA cautions that these counts partly reflect how councils record and report incidents, not just how much is actually dumped — the leap after 2012-13 is largely a reporting change.
Where the dumping happens
Incidents in the latest year by the type of land they were found on. Most fly-tipping in Leeds lands on highways and council land — the places the council itself must clear.
Does anything happen to the dumpers?
Enforcement actions — investigations, warning letters, notices and fixed penalties — against incidents recorded. Leeds has generally matched actions to incidents roughly one-for-one, though most actions are investigations rather than penalties.
Sources: Local authority collected waste management and fly-tipping statistics for England, published by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Last updated —.
All figures are for the Leeds City Council area as a whole and by financial year — DEFRA publishes nothing ward-by-ward, and bin-collection performance isn't open data at all. Recycling rates come from councils' WasteDataFlow returns, computed by DEFRA on a consistent national method. DEFRA's own caveat on fly-tipping: incident counts partly reflect each council's recording and reporting practice, not just the amount actually dumped, so year-to-year jumps can be administrative rather than real.