This is the total weight of household waste — bins, recycling, garden waste, tip visits — that arose in the area over a year, in tonnes. On its own it mostly tells you how big the area is, not how well the service runs, so it is used as the base for fairer per-person and percentage measures. Be careful when adding councils together: collection and disposal councils can report the same tonnes, so naive totals double-count.
| name | household_waste_total_tonnes |
|---|---|
| dataset | 12-wastedataflow |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric |
| unit | tonnes/year |
| grain | council-year |
| role | denominator |
| source | LA_and_Regional_Spreadsheet_2024-25.ods, sheet Table_1, column 'Household - total waste (tonnes)' (per Financial Year x Local Authority) |
| period | 2014-15 to 2024-25 |
| missingness | Depends on authority type: collection authorities have collection cost but no disposal tonnage responsibility; sum only unitary + disposal authorities for totals (double-counting warning printed in Table_1 itself). |
| score_note | Solid denominator base; raw tonnage only, with authority-type double-counting caveats. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
Total household waste collected by (or for) the authority in the financial year. It is the denominator base for per-head and recycling measures, indicating the scale of the council's household waste stream. When aggregating across councils, avoid double-counting between collection and disposal authorities.