Dealing with Hertfordshire's waste

The county council, as Waste Disposal Authority, is responsible for finding ways to dispose of over 500,000 tonnes of municipal waste that Hertfordshire's residents produce each year.

The Hertfordshire Waste Partnership (a partnership between the county council and 10 district councils) has developed a Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy that sets out policies for how we will deal with the county's household waste.

At the heart of the Strategy is the principle Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first priority is to reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place, then either reuse materials, recycle or compost them.

Hertfordshire residents are already doing a great job recycling and composting around 48% of household waste, and we are committed to increasing this to at least 50% by 2012. We will do this by trying to increase the use of existing services and introducing new schemes to make recycling and composting easier.

Last year around 285,000 tonnes of municipal waste was not recycled. Whilst our focus is on reducing, reusing and recycling waste, there will always be some material left over that cannot be recycled. Government and European Union legislation requires local authorities to do everything possible to prevent waste from ending up in landfill. If they don’t, they face fines for not reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill. These fines would ultimately have to be passed on to the taxpayer.

However effective we are in reducing, reusing and recycling waste, there will always be some material left to dispose of. Rather than simply disposing of this waste, we have been looking into ways of recovering valuable energy and materials from it, in addition to reducing our reliance on landfill.

Information on our work to find a solution for treating Hertfordshire’s waste is under the section The Future of Hertfordshire’s Waste.