Understanding the barriers to recycling in London flats

Resource London and Peabody Housing are working in partnership to look at the barriers to recycling in purpose-built flats in dense urban areas and to find solutions.

To help them, we at Resource Futures have been busy collecting data on recycling at 141 estates in London, providing valuable information to eight boroughs on recycling behaviour and infrastructure. 12 of these estates have now been selected for the two-year project.

Establishing the baseline for the project is critical, to tell us what effect any changes have. So we’re excited to now be working with Resource London on the next phase of fieldwork, monitoring waste and recycling at the 12 estates. Our teams in London are weighing and analysing rubbish, recycling and food waste before each weekly collection is made – covering about 1,600 households in total.

This tells us how much, and what type, of materials flat-dwellers are throwing away, and also how much of the recyclable materials are in the right place.

Armed with the data and other insights, Resource London and their partners are designing interventions to make the system work better for residents and increase recycling.

Next year we’ll do all this monitoring again to see what effect the changes have had. And hopefully all of this information will be used to make changes across many other boroughs too, making it easier to recycle for those living in flats.

Read our article on the CIWM Online Journal by Resource Futures Senior Consultant Agnieszka Chruszcz, who says that recycling in flats has been overlooked, and explains how we can find out the barriers to recycling faced by people who live in flats.