Waste recycling rate

Waste prevention is preferable to recycling, but operations cannot always eliminate every residual material. The waste recycling rate shows how much of the waste generated is recovered for reuse or recycling instead of being sent to disposal. It can reveal environmental progress, avoided disposal cost and value recovered from materials.

When to use it

• Answer the performance question: “To what extent are we recovering our waste for reuse or recycling?”
• Monitor the corporate-social-responsibility perspective.
• Compare recovery routes across sites, materials and periods.
• Assess progress only alongside total waste generation and prevention.

Origins

Recycling rates became common policy and corporate indicators as modern environmental regulation introduced a waste hierarchy. That hierarchy places prevention first, followed by reuse and recycling, then other recovery and disposal. The ordering matters: an organisation can report a high recycling rate while still generating unnecessary waste.

What it is

Perspective: Corporate social responsibility perspective.

Key performance question: To what extent are we recovering our waste for reuse or recycling?

The KPI expresses recovered waste as a proportion of waste generated within a defined boundary. Recovery can avoid landfill or incineration charges, reduce purchases when materials are reused internally and produce income when a verified recycler or another company buys the material.

Track the rate by waste stream as well as in aggregate. A rising average can conceal growth in hazardous or high-impact waste, contamination of recycled material or a denominator changed by outsourcing.

How to use it

Measurement