Circular economy
Coventry produces around 122,000 tonnes of municipal waste a year. Only a small percentage of the city’s waste goes to landfill (1.8% of household waste for 23/34). The majority of Coventry’s non-recyclable waste is incinerated at a facility at Bar Road, not far from the city centre. The facility has been retrofitted over the years to improve efficiency through generating power and more recently heat which supplies a number of key buildings in the city via the Heatline network, including the Council estate, the Wave Leisure Centre, Cathedral and will soon expand to provide heat to Coventry University campus.
The new Sherbourne Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) opened in autumn 2024. This was a £58M joint project by 8 local councils - located alongside the existing Bar Road waste processing site on London Road. This state-of-the-art facility will significantly expand local recycling capacity with the ability to process 175,000 tonnes of mainly domestic recycling annually, by leveraging AI enabled robotic sorting equipment. The launch of the new facility is an important step in helping to boost the city’s recycling rates by expanding the variety of materials that can be recycling and will also enable us to sell back recyclables to new markets.
Recycling rates increased from 30.5% to 34.2% in 23/24, which can be partly attributed to the technologies being used at the new MRF leading to reduced levels of rejected materials. As the new facility opened part way through the year, it is anticipated that this will help to support increased rates in 24/25. Whilst this is positive progress, it is still below the England average of 42.5% and more work is needed in terms of educational campaigns to encourage more households to recycle, alongside working with those households where there are barriers to recycling, such as those in flats.