‘We haven’t been given the money to get it right’: why so much of the UK is rubbish at recycling

theguardian.com:

On the face of it, Brighton comes across as a environmentally friendly place. As well as having a Green-led council and being home to the constituency of Britain’s only Green MP, signs of waste consciousness are everywhere.

A coffee stand at the station promotes its “compostable” takeaway cups, and the steep streets nearby are dotted with big communal recycling bins. A pink and green-painted old milkfloat called Bianca, named after the former EastEnders character, jaggedly glides from house to house, processing carefully sorted recycling boxes on behalf of the cooperative Magpie Recycling.

A few streets along, under the bunting of Brighton Open Market, volunteers at the Green Centre hover over residents – and kindly but firmly correct them where appropriate – as they sort their trickier-to-recycle waste into buckets that wait to collect everything from Marigold gloves to Kinder and Babybel wrapping, coffee packaging and corks.

“As a country, we are addicted to recycling,” said Melanie Rees, who runs the Green Centre. “I started this 17 years ago and it hasn’t shifted. The fascination, the addiction to recycling.”

And yet, in 2020, the unitary authority of Brighton and Hove sent just 29% of its household waste for reuse, recycling or composting (though the council says this has risen since to 30.5%). This puts it in the bottom 40 of councils in England.

While Brighton might be one of the worst performers when it comes to recycling nationally, it is also a prime example of a wider problem affecting large parts of England as well as Scotland and Northern Ireland: we are rubbish at recycling – and are getting worse.

According to the latest Defra figures, released in May, the amount of household waste recycled in England actually