Every Thursday morning a street of sandstone townhouses in a smart enclave of Bristol is transformed by an endless line of bins, bags and boxes.
Residents in Clifton separate their rubbish into general refuse, plastic and metal, cardboard, paper and glass, food and garden waste. There are another eight optional collections including clothing, batteries and shoes. Bristol has 13 waste collections, more than any other council in the country.
“It looks awful today,” says John Fillely, a 29-year-old banker, weighed down by recycling. “If you make one mistake and put a can or jar in the wrong box, they leave it all here.”
His neighbour, Joanne Wilson, 49, lives in a flat and explains that storing the bins is a nightmare. “We either put them in the basement or in the hallway,” she said. “But it absolutely stinks in the hallway now.”
Down the street, lawyer John Gray, 53, also lives in a flat, but said “a system has evolved naturally” where whoever is home on a Wednesday night takes the bins out for the whole block.
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Others struggle, Gray said: “It is a problem with elderly people. Our neighbour has dementia and remembering which materials go in which bins is beyond her abilities.”
The UK recycles 44.1 per centhttps://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-waste-data/uk-statistics-on-waste of all waste produced by households, including recyclables and landfill items. While most cities struggle to recycle more than a third, Bristol is the only big English city that achieves above the average, recycling 46 per cent of household waste.
In September, Rishi Sunak said that he would scrap proposals to “force you to have seven different bins”. Laws would be introduced to prevent “an excessive number of bins” on the kerbside, the government later added.
Yet analysis by The Sunday Times has found that the more bins a council uses, the more it recycles.
Areas with two bins — refuse and mixed recycling — recycle 40 per cent on average, while those with seven, where items are divided into different categories, recycle 58 per cent.
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Dr Helen Holmes, a sociology and sustainable consumption lecturer at the University of Manchester, said the recycling rate had plateaued because of “huge confusion” about council rules.
Germany has the best recycling rate in the world at almost 69 per cent. On average, Germans have four bins, then glass has to be taken to either supermarket collection points or a bottle bank and sorted by colour. To achieve this, labels on packaging were simplified and education programmes introduced.
In the UK, Holmes explains, that “at the last estimate, there were 39 different bin regimes across 391 different local authorities”.
Research by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) group found that more than half of us miss opportunities to recycle common items.
The best 16 councils for recycling are all in Wales. Pembrokeshire, which comes out top, recycles 73 per cent of household waste. Across Wales, a target has been set to recycle 70 per cent of waste by 2025. Barrow-in-Furness has the lowest rate at 17.7 per cent. The worst ten areas include four London boroughs, Birmingham and Liverpool, which all recycle less than a quarter of household waste.
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The most rural areas recycle almost 10 per cent more than urban areas on average, our analysis found.
Julie James, the Welsh government’s minister for climate change, explains some of the reasons why recycling is harder in cities. “There’s a real issue if you have a high percentage of your population in apartment blocks,” she said. Limited pavement space means flats share fewer communal bins, which are further away and often less clearly labelled.
Age is also a factor. People under 35 dispose of more items incorrectly than older people, and councils with a higher median age have better recycling rates.
Wealth comes into it too. Birmingham, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets are in the 25 most deprived councils, based on the proportion of people who are out of work or on low earnings. All of these places struggle to recycle effectively.
After Sunak’s comments, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) set out reforms it planned to introduce to “drive up recycling rates”.
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From March 2026, all councils will be required to recycle the same materials, it said. “This policy provides clarity to local authorities and ensures there is a comprehensive, consistent recycling service across England,” a Defra spokesman said.
“This will reduce confusion with recycling to improve recycling rates, ensure there is more recycled material in the products we buy, and support the UK recycling industry.”
While the new policy will standardise the materials that can be collected and enforce the minimum of three bins, councils such as Bristol are likely to be allowed to continue their current schemes, meaning that disparities will still continue.
Wales has set a target of recycling 70 per cent of household waste by 2025, which would make it the leader in Europe and potentially the world, overtaking Germany.
The Welsh school curriculum includes classes on how food waste is converted into energy and mandatory school trips to anaerobic digestion plants.
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Councils sell waste they collect to companies that recycle it into new materials which can then be sold for a profit. In England, councils negotiate these contracts themselves. For example, Bristol’s cardboard and paper is sent to Kent, food is sent to Avonmouth, glass to Essex, plastic to Corby and cans to Wales.
Dividing recycling into separate bins reduces contamination, such as cardboard getting wet from washed glass jars. Uncontaminated waste is easier to recycle into higher quality materials, meaning that councils get more money.
Because every household in Wales has the same bins and separates the same materials, recycling is far less contaminated, which has attracted companies that can recycle it into new materials for profit. Up to 80 per cent of Wales’ recycling is processed locally, which means councils make more money from the waste collected.
Spelling this process out to people in Wales has made people more likely to recycle, James explains. “We’ve tried to get across to people that this is valuable material ... This is stuff that we can sell to help our public services be funded,” she said.
In some parts of the UK, however, recycling is harder.
On collection day in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, one residential street is lined with overflowing communal bins, surrounded by ripped cardboard, used nappies and crisp packets. Residents are told to split waste into two categories — refuse and recycling. Less than 20 per cent of overall waste is recycled, making it the second worst place in Britain.
Elsie Burne, 29, takes her rubbish a five-minute walk to bins on the high street shared between several buildings. “The recycling bin is full of black bags because there’s nothing else people can do with it ... The council keeps sending notices saying people are flytipping, but there’s nowhere else to put it,” she said.
Lulu Smith, who lives nearby, said some had little pride in how the area looks because they are only there for a year or two before moving on. The anonymity of communal bins means people shirk responsibility, she believes. Others are put off separating their own rubbish when they see neighbours have not.
“People put food in it. I see used nappies in there,” Smith said.
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A council spokesman said: “Tower Hamlets is the most densely populated borough in England, where 88 per cent of residential properties are flats and 80 per cent of residents have communal bins.”
The council has invested £2.1 million to improve recycling over the next three years. “We have also rolled out a borough-wide campaign that aims to tackle contamination and encourage recycling,” the spokesman added.
Back in Clifton, many have gripes about the many bags and containers on the streets. Fillely, the young banker, is selling his flat, but avoids booking viewings on Thursdays because of the “ugly” bins.
For Kye Dudd, though, Bristol’s councillor for climate and waste, the city’s approach to having more bins on the streets makes people more aware. “For a decade or more, we’ve been doing the kerbside collection where all the recycling is separated by households. It engages the residents in the recycling process because you’ve got to do a little bit more to present your waste,” he said.
