WasteDataFlow Guidance - England
It is important for local authorities to submit data into WasteDataFlow in a timely manner (for England, the deadline for the reporting of each quarter's data is three months after the end of the quarter).
WasteDataFlow provides data for the main metric to monitor progress towards future recycling targets. The Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 contains a duty for the Secretary of State to produce a waste management plan for England and that the plan contains measures to ensure a 65% recycling rate and that no more than 10% of municipal waste is landfilled by 2035. WasteDataFlow data helps with meeting the requirement of the waste management plan by ensuring that we have accurate statistics to monitor progress with national recycling rates.
The data will also help to monitor progress with the government’s Resources and Waste Strategy more generally, including evaluating the impact of proposed reforms such as Consistency of Waste Collection, a Deposit Return Scheme and Extended Producer Responsibility. Waste and recycling statistics summarising data reported in WasteDataFlow are available here. The data are also widely used by local authorities for benchmarking and planning waste management activities; the waste sector as a whole and the wider public also make use of the data through the online portal.
Submission Deadlines
The deadlines for English LAs to submit their data to L30 are as follows:
NB For Fly-tipping module submission deadlines, please see here.
Frequently Asked Questions
An FAQ document can be found here.
Question-by-Question Guidance for England
Question-by-question guidance for English local authorities can be found here.
Sections
To assist WDF Users in entering accurate data into WDF, a range of guidance notes have been produced. This includes
information on the following:
The following guidance is no longer active and now provided for information only in an archive section at the bottom of the page:
Training Slides
Please find below the slides for the WDF training sessions run for English local authorities.
Please find below a series of guidance notes on specific aspects of data reporting in WDF. These include reference to data entry for Qu100 in England; reporting specific material
types e.g. co-mingled materials, rubble, organic waste, street sweepings and WEEE. Information on how to request new sites to be added to the selection list and complete the annual data return is also included.
A number of authorities are now using treatment technologies to separate out further recycling
from their residual waste streams. Please refer to the Qu100 Data Entry Guidance Document
section 3 which details some site specific examples of waste movements. There are several examples of
how recyclate is extracted from residual waste during treatment and how this is then represented in Qu100.
Some WCAs receive data from their WDAs regarding recyclate which has been extracted from the residual
waste stream. This is known as a back allocation. Please refer to the Qu100 Data Entry Guidance Document
section 4.4 regarding how to record back allocations. For specific guidance on recording back allocated recyclate
from street sweepings please refer to the Street Sweepings guidance document
“Waste from Households” is the headline recycling measure published for
England. It is calculated by each of the four United Kingdom countries and provides a standardised measure to see progress in recycling performance for the UK.
Guidance on the "waste from households" recycling calculation is available at the link below.
The National Indicators were a raft of measures monitoring local authority (LA) performance for waste disposal between April 2008 and March 2011. Though no longer used by government to monitor LA performance they still provide useful benchmarking tools for LA’s, Defra and the public to understand LA waste and recycling performance. The key guidance documents for National Indicators are provided below. To enable more detailed disposal reporting and record recycling from the residual stream Qu100 was introduced between April 2014 and April 2015. The National Indicator calculations were replaced with comparator calculations which provide results comparable to those from the pre Qu100 question set, but instead using Qu100 data.