What colour is recycling?

As Junior Consultant Jacob Redfern can attest, trying to act green can get you feeling blue when choosing what bin to use for recycling.

Anyone who has moved from one area of the country to another has probably experienced that head-scratching puzzle of trying to figure out what goes in each bin. Honestly, what on earth am I putting in a burgundy bin? Anyone from Dundee would tell me that burgundy is for plastics and tins – of course – and would then ask what my green bin is for.

For me, green is obviously the colour for recycling. It’s the colour we use when we talk about sustainability: living green lifestyles, having green jobs, joining green political parties and, if you’re being deceitful, greenwashing. Even WRAP’s Recycle Now branding and recycling brand guidelines for local authorities use green as the primary colour. So, when thinking about which container to use for my sustainable habits, I will instinctively look for the green one.  However, in most council areas I will either not find one or I would be putting my recyclables into the wrong bin. To understand why this is the case, we need to know how we ended up with such a mix. 

How we ended up with so many colours for recycling

When kerbside recycling collections began in the UK during the 1980s, they were organised by social enterprises working at a local scale (such as Friends of the Earth in Bristol). Most were cash strapped and so used whatever was available to use as collection vessels. Across the next two decades – as kerbside collections became more widespread – wheelie bins became more popular. Waste collection was being privatised across the UK, and the efficiencies offered by large-capacity bins that didn’t need carrying was very attractive – while mostly used for general waste, they were also being used by the growing recycling industry. The 2003 Household Waste Recycling Act sealed the fate of the ‘extra bin’ when it mandated all councils in England and Wales must collect recycling separately from general waste.

But what should this extra bin look like? What would distinguish it from general waste? It was left to each individual council or waste collection authority to answer this question and therefore hundreds of different answers emerged. Colours were an established way of separating materials, with bottle banks being a familiar practice but, with each authority left to choose their own colour for the new bin, a veritable rainbow of plastic arrived on our streets.

Changing material collections and evolving capacity needs has meant that bins have not stayed constant since 2003. New bins have been added, old bins taken away and, in some councils, the use of a particular bin has changed. Where councils have wanted to increase the capacity for recycling and decrease it for general waste, some have elected to simply swap the purposes of bins, thereby swapping the colour for recycling, rather than purchasing new ones and sending the old ones to themselves be binned.

Some councils have taken the innovative step to move beyond the wheelie bin to the wheelie box. Designed to increase kerbside separation with the convenience of a wheelie bin, this stack of three boxes has been popular in Wales. However, even this new system has been applied inconsistently when it comes to the colours used, with Anglesey choosing red for the top, paper box, while Denbighshire opted for blue. Gwynedd, meanwhile, doesn’t use colours at all, just the box’s position – top, middle, or bottom – to demarcate which box is used for which materials. 

This fractured bin management has led to a situation where recycling communications often must avoid using colours when talking about separation. Certainly, national campaigns have had to rely on symbols or images, with the hope that local authorities would mimic these, to prevent adding extra steps between the audience and the desired behaviour by asking them to ‘check your local recycling’.

Locally, many authorities can specify colour in their communications, though this isn’t always the case. As authorities split and merge, you end up with situations where bins aren’t even consistent within a single council area.

Local authorities who do use colour in their communications aren’t necessarily reducing confusion, either. It reinforces a local sense of what is normal, making bin choices bewildering when crossing the border. Not from the UK to France, or even England to Scotland, but from Calderdale to Burnley. Moving house, or simply going on holiday within the UK, can cause a chaos of contamination as people mistakenly apply their localised knowledge to a different system.

This confusion of colour has not gone unnoticed. The early form of the Simpler Recycling legislation, Consistency in Household and Business Recycling, began with a suggestion that bin colours should be standardised. A 2019 consultation found that the majority of respondents were in favour of standardisation. By 2021, however, Defra had decided against continuing with this recommendation on the grounds that it would lead to excessive costs for waste collection authorities. Its directives were instead accompanied with the soft guidance that local authorities should consider moving to “the most appropriate bin colours to reduce confusion” – but with no indication of what those colours are.

What colours are our bins?

As part of a larger piece of local authority research, we recently surveyed the various waste collection vessels used by local authorities across the UK. This includes the essential detail of what colour of vessel they are using for each material. I’m using the word ‘vessel’ as there’s a whole range of bins, boxes, bags and more used for collection (but that’s a discussion for another day). So, what colour is a recycling bin?

If we look at all the bins used to collect recycling, then this is the distribution we get. Blue is the dominant colour at 41% with green next most common at 21%. Black is more common than expected with 7.8% of recycling bins being that colour. So, it turns out, green is not the colour of recycling – it’s blue (and almost half of you would have been telling me that from the beginning).

But the wider story is a little more complicated than that. While there has been a trend towards a single, co-mingled bin for the sake of convenience, many waste collection authorities prioritise the value of separated collection. The Simpler Recycling legislation also recommends the separate collection of paper and card from other recyclables. If we break the data down by material and focus on instances where paper is collected separately from plastic, this is the distribution of colours that we see:

Blue is far more popular for paper and card, with over 50% of separated bins being blue. For the other materials the range is more mixed. Green remains in second place, though is more significant for glass than for plastic and metal vessels. Red is the third choice for plastic and metal, which is interesting given the hazardous associations with the colour. For glass, black is the third choice, though looking closer at the data this is more linked to boxes than bins.

Who is using what bin?

It is clear that different council areas associate recycling with a whole range of colours, so mandating standardised colours is guaranteed to upset at least half of them. However, what if instead of national standardisation we started a bit smaller. Are there regions or zones that could be made uniform with less conflict?

Breaking the data down geographically shows that colour consistency is about as uniform as the colours sported by the local football team. Interestingly, there isn’t always consistency within council areas, with some having two or even three colours associated with a single material, with changes depending on postcode or between flats and houses. With this dispersal of colours being so apparently random there is little reason to focus on regional rollouts. Any mandated standardisation may as well be national.

What colour should bins be?

Based on the existing distributions some possible colour schemes suggest themselves. Where paper and card are collected separately from plastic, as Simpler Recycling recommends, blue is the clear choice for paper and card. For plastic and metal, you may think that green should be the colour of choice.

Co-mingled collections continue to be popular, however, and if we’re standardising colours, then perhaps green should be reserved for mixed recyclables. That would lead plastic and metal to be collected in a red bin. Glass may also be co-mingled with plastic and metal, or it may be collected separately. Where it is collected separately, the distinction is often by vessel type, box over bin, rather than colour so perhaps we could standardise this as a blue box? Or if it really needs its own colour then perhaps this is where we can get creative and use a teal, or turquoise even. [1]

By complete coincidence, these match up with the colours identified by WRAP for various collections. [2] The added benefit of the WRAP scheme is that they also have icons to accompany their colours. The differentiation between bins must be accessible to all, so we cannot rely on colour alone, but colour is an effective tool to help guide ideal recycling behaviour for most people.

There’s no sign of consistent bin colours being introduced any time soon, but it is something that individual waste authorities can look to move towards over time, just so long as everyone moves in the same direction. For now, however, just make sure you’re checking what colour bins are for what material when you’re away from home, so you don’t end up accidentally wasting those precious recyclables.

[1] Plastic and metal may also be collected separately from each other, though this research suggests that it is quite rare and is not mandated by simpler recycle. Such source separation mavericks can choose their own colour.

[2] WRAP do separate plastics and metal from each other. The colour used for metal is orange.