The amount of municipal waste being sent to landfill has been cut by a million tonnes during 2004/05, new provisional national statistics from WasteDataFlow indicate.

Provisional figures released at the end of last week by WasteDataFlow (a system that collates municipal waste data from local authorities) show that there has been a reduction in both the tonnage and the proportion of waste being sent to landfill sites - down from 20.9m tonnes in 2003/04 to 19.9 million tonnes in 2004/05, a 5% decrease.  This is equivalent to every household in England sending around six black sacks less of waste to landfill than they did in the previous year.

At the same time, there is increasing evidence of a slow down in the growth in the amount of waste being produced - average annual increases have more than halved to 1.5% in the past 5 years, compared to 3.4% in the preceding 5 years.

Local Environmental Quality Minister, Ben Bradshaw said these figures are a sign that things are continuing to move in the right direction: "This is an extremely encouraging development," he said.  "Less municipal waste is being sent to landfill which means that more waste is being put to better use through recycling and reuse, or indeed is being prevented in the first instance."

He added: "Diverting increasing amounts of waste from landfill through recycling is in no doubt thanks in part to better quality council services, including greatly expanded and more efficient kerbside recycling collection schemes.  But also I suspect that community reuse projects such as the Freecycle initiative and indeed the growing popularity of auction websites which encourage reuse are playing a part too.  It shows that despite the warnings we can and are turning a corner in the way we manage our waste."

Today's announcement coincides with the Government's ongoing consultation on its review of England's waste strategy. The consultation proposes not only much greater levels of recycling (with a 50% recycling target for 2020) but a much greater emphasis on waste minimisation in the first instance.

The Government intends to encourage waste minimisation by engaging with businesses and manufacturers so that products are designed to be easy to recycle or recover and with a limited environmental impact before they even reach consumers.

To read the consultation paper and accompanying Regulatory Impact Assessment and Environment Report see http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/wastestratreview/index.htm. Deadline for comments is 9 May 2006.
People will also be able to respond to the consultation online, see: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/strategy/review/