New report from Defra reveals carbon impact of household waste

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has released experimental statistics estimating carbon emissions from household waste between 2016 and 2020.

This move marks an important shift for government to possibly consider using carbon impact as a metric in the future to measure performance in managing England’s household waste, instead of relying solely on weight-based targets.

Carbon Waste and Resources Metric

The figures are consumption-based estimates of the impact of different materials contained within waste following treatment by recycling, incineration for energy from waste (EfW), and landfill. Defra says the estimates, which were produced using the Carbon Waste and Resources Metric (Carbon WARM), are a work in progress and that the methodology and outputs would be updated in future editions of its notice.

The Carbon WARM factors are a set of conversion factors produced by WRAP for Defra, and are designed to enable users to express waste management tonnage data regarding their Greenhouse Gas emissions relative to landfill.

Although figures reveal an overall decline and an average of 697,000 tonnes of carbon saved annually over the last five years, Defra notes a 0.5 million tonne increase in carbon emissions during the pandemic, due to disrupted waste collections at kerbside and increased tonnages of residual waste generated by households.

Key figures

The Carbon WARM methodology reveals that total or overall emissions from household waste are the sum of emissions from waste management by landfill, EfW, composting or Anaerobic digestion of organics and recycling. The figures show that changes are driven by the weight of waste collected and changes in waste treatments.

The report shows that negative values suggest that overall for all materials there is a net saving in emissions for a waste management method over use of virgin material or fuel. This takes into account emissions from extraction, and energy used in transport and production of virgin materials. Positive values (e.g. for energy from waste) indicate that a given management method releases more emissions into the atmosphere relative to using virgin materials or fuels.