Does the collection system have a meaningful impact on recycling rate?
This project explores the question above. Kerbside sort recycling systems place a high burden on the householder to sort and store their waste in up to seven bins, but do these systems achieve higher recycling rates than the alternative co-mingled system, where all recyclable waste is put into a single bin and sorted off-site?
The analysis compares household recycling rates across 309 English local authorities in 2021, grouped by collection system (Co-Mingled, Two Stream or Multi-Stream). It uses a Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's post-hoc comparisons to test for differences, and linear regression to control for authority size.
The headline finding is that collection system is associated with a real but modest difference in recycling rate. The meaningful divide is between mixing everything in one bin and having some level of separation, rather than between separating a little and separating a lot. Most of the variation in recycling rates lies outside the collection system.
| Path | Description |
|---|---|
recycling-systems-analysis.qmd |
The analysis document (source for the published page) |
custom.scss |
Data Translator branding for the rendered document |
R/theme_datatranslator.R |
Brand palette and ggplot theme, sourced by the analysis |
R/1-utils.R to R/5-export-data.R |
Data pipeline: acquisition, preparation, modelling and export |
data/src/ |
Raw source data (not tracked; see Data below) |
data/cln/ |
Cleaned datasets produced by the pipeline |
ref/ |
Reference material |
- R (>= 4.0)
- Quarto CLI
- R packages:
tidyverse,here,knitr,moments,rstatix,broom,showtext
Rendering downloads the Work Sans and Roboto Mono fonts from Google Fonts, so a network connection is required.
The cleaned dataset used by the analysis (data/cln/data_recycling_system.csv) is included in the repository. To rebuild it from source, download the following into data/src/ and run the pipeline scripts in R/ in numbered order.
- Local Authority Districts (Dec 2021) Names and Codes in the UK (Save as
data/src/lad21.xlsx) - Local Authority District to Region (April 2021) Lookup in England (Save as
data/src/lad21-to-region21.csv) - Local Authority Districts (December 2021) Boundaries GB BFE (Save as
data/src/lad21-shapefile/) - Mid-2021 edition Estimates of the population for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (Save as
data/src/population-by-lad-2021.xls) - Mid-2019 edition Estimates of the population for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Norther Ireland (Save as
data/src/population-by-lad-2019.xls) - Local authority collected waste management - annual results (Save as
data/src/recycling-by-lad-2021.xlsx) - Freedom of Information request for data on recycling systems by local authority for 2021 (Save as
data/src/EIR2023_21546.xlsx) - English indices of deprivation 2019 (Save as
data/src/deprivation-by-lad-2019.xlsx) - 2021 rural-urban classification (save as
data/src/ruc-by-lad-2021.xlsx) - Code History Database (December 2021) for the UK - changes.csv (save as
data/src/chd-2021-changes.csv)
The links above go to the original source location of the data. Should the links ever go stale, a copy of the same data can also be found on Kaggle.
Render locally to preview:
quarto render recycling-systems-analysis.qmdPublish the rendered document to GitHub Pages:
quarto publish gh-pages recycling-systems-analysis.qmdThis renders the document, pushes the output to the gh-pages branch, and updates the published page at https://clarelgibson.github.io/uk-recycling/. The _publish.yml file records the publishing target, so subsequent runs do not prompt for confirmation.
This project is licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal licence. See the LICENSE file for details.