Summary: one company recycled, one incinerated (which creates a small amount of hazardous waste), and one company sent the bales to landfill. In the U.K. (at l

Summary: one company recycled, one incinerated (which creates a small amount of hazardous waste), and one company sent the bales to landfill. In the U.K. (at least a few years ago) councils (ie local authorities) are supposed to try to meet targets for recycling. These come in various kinds: 1. Targets for the percentage of their waste that is recycleable 2. Targets for the percentage of the waste that is recycled 3. Targets for the total quantity of kinds of unrecycleable waste Part 1 generally means trying to reduce the amount of non-recycleable waste that is produced. Partly this can be done by reducing waste in general, and partly by ensuring that waste is better categorised (in the EU there is a complicated categorisation scheme of waste, so eg hardcore is treated differently to various plastics which are different from food or batteries. Some categories are hazardous and have to be treated differently and may only be sent to certain facilities) Part 2 generally means trying to increase the available facilities to recycle that waste (and decrease the capacity for recycleable waste [1]) Part 3 is generally about trying to guess how much waste will be produced (eg population/large construction predictions) [1] in the eu waste is typically handled by companies where one must pay a fee (or sell—the fee may be negative) for another company to handle the waste. By reducing the supply of landfill (or by giving incentives for recycling), the price for recycling can become low enough that it is preferable. If the price decreases sufficiently then further sorting of mixed waste may become profitable. In general the main method for trying to control recycling is trying to change market conditions (ie prices) rather than trying to impose and distribute quotas. There are various arguments among economists about which method is better (and whether the methods are actually different). Success is measured by trying to estimate how much of the waste in a local authority is recycled (by asking various waste disposal facilities, assuming no illegal disposal, and somehow figuring out what waste was sourced/handled outside the local authority) In the UK, incineration (aka Energy from Waste or EfW) is generally considered a “good” kind of waste disposal but slightly less good than recycling.