Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the amount of (a) food waste and (b) total bio-degrable waste that goes to (i) incineration and (ii) landfill in each of the last three years.

Data for waste arisings and treatment are not structured specifically around material streams so we cannot provide detailed information on the destination of total food waste. Large tonnages of both incinerated and landfilled waste are reported as “mixed” waste categories, for which we do not currently have estimates of food waste content.

Estimates of biodegradable municipal waste landfilled are published in the Defra UK Statistics on Waste publication, with the latest release containing data for 2010-2015. The estimated tonnages of biodegradable municipal waste landfilled in the UK in 2013, 2014 and 2015 were 9.3 million, 8.7 million and 7.7 million tonnes respectively.

We do not publish data on the composition of municipal solid waste that is received at incineration. However, it is estimated that the amounts of biodegradable municipal waste incinerated in England in 2014, 2015 and 2016 were 3.8 million, 4.6 million and 5.6 million tonnes respectively.