Recycling rates are worse than they were five years ago, after the percentage of waste being collected fell despite pledges to make the system simpler for households.
Latest figures from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) show that the amount of household rubbish being recycled dropped from 45.2 per cent in 2017 to 44.7 per cent in 2018.
It is the lowest since 2015, when rates were 44.3 and also lower than in 2014 when councils achieved 44.9.
The new results mean the government will almost certainly fail to reach its target of recycling half of household waste by 2020, with critics claiming the process is too difficult, even though public support
The Telegraph’s Zero Waste campaign is calling for the recycling system to be simplified and the government is currently consulting on making labelling more easy to understand, and cutting the amount of sorting that households need to do.
Louise Edge, head of Greenpeace UK’s ocean plastics campaign, said: “After a long period standing still, we’ve now started to go backwards. Recycling alone won’t solve this crisis, so long as we’re producing more and more waste.
“Our report this week showed how supermarkets are churning out more plastic than ever, despite commitments to cut down. Much of this is single-use, and difficult or impossible to recycle.
“We need to move away from a model that clearly isn’t working and urgently shift our focus to reusable and refillable packaging, which will drastically reduce the amount of waste that is produced in the first place.”
The latest figures showed that East Riding of Yorkshire was the top council for recycling, with rates of 65 per cent, with the London borough of Newham trailing at just 16.9 per cent. The capital sent the smallest proportion of waste for recycling out of all the English regions.
The amount of plant waste sent for recycling fell by 16.7 per cent, which Defra blamed on long periods of hot weather which stunted plant growth.
However the new statistics also showed that the amount of waste produced by each household had fallen from 403kg to 394kg, suggesting people are throwing less away. The total waste from households shrunk from 22.4 million tonnes to 22 million tonnes in 2018.
The amount of waste going to landfill fell by 500,000 tonnes, to 2,8 million tonnes, however the level of rubbish being incinerated rose by 400,000 tonnes to 11.2 million tonnes.
But experts said more needed to be done to make it easier for people to recycle, and to tap into the Blue Planet affect.
Britain currently has no national strategy for recycling with local authorities accepting a variety of materials and processing them in different ways.
For example all plastic bags, except biodegradable or compostable bags, can be recycled but only 18 per cent of households can recycle them because fewer than one in five councils accept them.
Likewise just only 10 per cent of homes can recycle cling film and plant pots and just one per cent of local authorities accept takeaway boxes.