For decades the traditional way of disposing of the UK's waste has been to bury it in landfill. However with landfill space fast running out and increasing concerns over its environmental impact, the government has started to limit the amount of waste that can be disposed of in this way.

You can help to reduce the amount of waste you produce by recycling everything you can and reusing useful things again. To discover what we are doing to minimise the amount of waste sent to landfill, visit the pages below.

• Procurement Strategy for Residual Waste Contracts
  Northamptonshire County Council is in the initial stages of procuring a contract to treat residual waste.
   
  
• Northamptonshire Waste Strategy
  The strategy outlines what Northamptonshire's eight local authorities are doing to develop a long term waste collection and disposal plan.
  
  
• Alternative Waste Technologies
  Find out more about a range of technological solutions that could potentially revolutionise the way we dispose of waste in the future.
  

Did you know?

• Each UK household produces over 1 tonne of rubbish annually, amounting to about 31 million tonnes for the UK each year.
• In less than 2 hours the UK produces enough waste to fill the Albert Hall.
• The cost of managing the municipal waste produced in England is around £1.6 billion per year.
• If all the aluminium drinks cans sold in the UK were recycled, there would be 14 million fewer full dustbins per year.
• In the UK we use around 12.5 billion steel cans every year, or 600 per household, but nearly 10 billion of these still go to landfill.
• About one fifth of the contents of household dustbins consist of paper and card, of which nearly half is newspapers and magazines. This is equivalent to over 4kg of waste paper and card per household in the UK each week.
• Every tonne of biodegradable waste produces 300-500 cubic metres of landfill gas.