A report released by BDS Marketing Research Ltd (BDS) has revealed that just five per cent of planning applications submitted during 2012 related to landfill. According to BDS, this confirms the steady decline of the UK’s reliance on landfill, as waste is increasingly being treated at facilities for recycling or recovery.

The report, released today (4 March), found that over half of planning consents in 2012 related to new or extended material recovery facilities (MRFs) and other recycling facilities and transfer stations, while 41 per cent was made up of composting, anaerobic digestion (AD), energy from waste (EfW), household waste recycling centres (HWRCs) and other consents.

As well as the decline in the landfill sector, the report also marked an increase of anaerobic digestion facilities, which represented over 10 per cent of waste facilities.

A breakdown of the planning consents found that in 2012:

• 30 per cent of planning consents were for waste transfer stations;
• 24 per cent were for MRFs;
• 16 per cent were for EfW;
• 13 per per cent were for AD;
• 6 per cent were for composting;
• 5 per cent were for landfill;
• 4 per cent were for HWRC; and
• 2 per cent were for ‘other’ facilities.

‘Municipal waste site extensions now rare’

The report found that the landfill consents granted to landfill sites typically related to time extensions, rather than expansions of ‘void’ space. According to the report, planning permissions for additional void at landfill sites taking municipal waste are now rare.

This is a vast contrast to the proposals for new waste facilities made 20 years ago, when the “majority referred to landfill,” said Julian Clapp, Principle Consultant at BDS.

He continued: "The landfill tax was introduced in 1996. From next month, the tax rises by a further £8 per tonne to £72 per tonne. This has changed the relative economics of waste disposal in favour of recycling and other disposal methods. It is important that the waste industry has the correct level of future capacity for these other technologies. We have now started to assess whether companies are getting the balance right between waste arisings and planned capacity. A detailed report will be published shortly."

BDS added that ‘waste management companies continue to be largely successful in obtaining consent for new facilities’, with 57 per cent of all applications consented and only 15 per cent refused (7 per cent were withdrawn). Around 26 per cent of applications have yet to be approved.

The planning permssions report follows on from BDS’s January report that revealed falling volumes of residual waste led to the closure of over 30 landfill sites in the UK in 2012, with only 8 opening or re-opening.

The UK's reliance on energy-from-waste facilities in dealing with residual waste remains a contentious issue however, with opponents claiming facilities often greatly overestimate the amount of material available to be incinerated, leading to overcapacity. Indeed, GAIA (the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), has warned that the EU’s increasing incineration capacity could damage recycling rates, while Eunomia released a report in 2012 that warned that without any change in residual waste quantities, by 2015/16, there would be treatment ‘overcapacity of 6.9 million tonnes per annum’.

Read more about BDS Marketing Research’s database of landfill sites.