Circular economy
Recycling and composting
The new material recycling facility is on track to be operational in the summer of 2023, with the exterior building nearly complete as of spring 2022. This is a £58M joint project by 8 local councils including Coventry and Nuneaton & Bedworth - located alongside the existing Binley 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 recycling annually by leveraging AI enabled robotic sorting equipment.
The provisional data for 2021/21 showed that the percentage of household waste recycled and composted has reduced from 34.0% in 2020/21 to 28.6%. From the beginning of January and for the remainder of the final quarter of 2021/22 all household waste collections were disrupted. With waste collections coming back on line first, followed by recycling collections from the w/c 21st March and garden waste collections from 19th April. This has had an impact on the city’s recycling rates.
Coventry is participating in the rapidly expanding global repair movement, alongside the longstanding reduce, reuse recycle mantra. The Coventry FabLab, a joint project between Coventry University, Warwick University, and the Council, has long held occasional repair café sessions – where people can bring a wide variety of possessions for free repair by volunteers. A new dedicated repair café organisation opened their doors in Hillfields in March 2022, significantly expanding access to free repair services in Coventry.