Waste & Recycling Rate Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-203 is a waste collection register that produces two figures you can defend: a recycling rate and a landfill diversion rate. You enter one line per container collected — weight, stream, destination, contractor and cost — and it converts every weight to a single unit, splits the tonnage by where it genuinely went, tracks contamination and works out what each part of the waste bill costs per tonne.

Everything runs inside this one file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so your tonnages, contractor names and prices stay on the computer you are using.

What to log, and from what

Log from the transfer note or weighbridge ticket, not from memory and not from the invoice. The invoice tells you what you paid; only the ticket tells you what was weighed and where it went. Keep the reference in the register so any figure on the report can be traced back to a piece of paper.

One line per container collected. If three skips leave on the same day, that is three lines, because they may have gone to different places at different prices. Combining them hides exactly the detail the rate depends on.

Do not leave a collection out because you have no weight for it. A missing heavy residual load is the single easiest way to overstate a recycling rate. If the carrier only gives you a volumetric estimate, enter it, and say so in the note — an honest estimate in the register beats a gap.

Waste streams

The stream describes what the material is. It is not the same as where it ended up: a mixed recycling load that was rejected at the gate is still a mixed recycling stream, but its destination that day was disposal. Keeping the two fields separate is what lets the tool show you rejected loads instead of quietly hiding them.

Twelve streams are offered, covering general or residual waste, mixed recycling, paper and card, glass, plastics, metals, food and organic waste, wood, construction and demolition waste, hazardous waste, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and a catch-all "other". Use "other" sparingly; a register with a large "other" bar tells you nothing you can act on.

Destinations

The destination drives both rates, so it is the field worth being strict about.

• Destination — Meaning — Recycled — Diverted
• Recycled — Reprocessed into new material — Yes — Yes
• Reused — Used again as it is, or refurbished — Yes — Yes
• Composted / AD — Composted or anaerobically digested — Yes — Yes
• Energy recovery — Burned, energy captured — Setting — Setting
• Landfill — Buried — No — No
• Incineration, no recovery — Burned, nothing captured — No — No
• Not known — You cannot say — No — No

Two of those choices are deliberate and you may disagree with them. Incineration without energy recovery is treated as disposal, not as diversion, because burning material to no purpose is not a better outcome than burying it and a diversion figure that counts it is not measuring anything useful. An unknown destination is treated as disposal too, because a tonne you cannot account for is a tonne you cannot claim. If your own scheme takes a different view, say so when you publish the number.

The two rates, and why they differ

This is the part that matters. The recycling rate and the landfill diversion rate are different numbers, and treating them as interchangeable is the most common way an organisation ends up overstating its environmental performance in good faith.

Recycled weight covers material that comes back into use: recycling, reuse and composting or anaerobic digestion. Diverted weight covers everything that stayed out of landfill and out of pointless incineration, which by default also includes energy recovery.

So a site that sends every scrap of residual waste to an energy-from-waste plant can honestly report 100 % diversion from landfill while recycling only half of what it produces. Both statements are true. Quoting only the first, in a context where a reader will hear "we recycle almost everything", is where the misleading starts. The tool therefore shows both rates on the tiles, both on every row of the monthly table, and never blends them.

Both rates are weight-based. They say nothing about the environmental value of what was recycled — a tonne of aggregate and a tonne of aluminium count the same here and are worth wildly different amounts in carbon terms. A weight-based rate is the standard measure and it is the one people ask for, but it is a measure of mass, not of benefit.

Kilograms and tonnes

Waste paperwork mixes units constantly: the food waste ticket is in kilograms, the skip ticket is in tonnes. Adding those figures together is a real and frequent error, and it produces a number that is wrong by a factor of a thousand in whichever direction you got unlucky.

This tool never adds raw weights. Each collection is recorded in whichever unit its ticket used, then converted before anything is totalled:

The register shows both: the weight as it was on the ticket next to its unit, and the converted figure in the "Weight (report unit)" column. If those two columns ever look inconsistent with each other, the unit on that line is wrong. The tool also refuses a single collection of more than 100 tonnes entered in kilograms, because that is almost always a unit slip rather than a genuinely enormous skip.

Contamination

Contamination is the share of a load that was rejected or downgraded — the general waste in the card bay, the liquid in the dry recycling. Enter it as a percentage of that load, where somebody actually assessed it.

The headline contamination figure is not divided by your total tonnage. It is divided only by the weight of the collections where a contamination figure was recorded:

That is the honest basis. Most streams are never assessed for contamination, and leaving a field blank means "nobody looked", not "there was none". Dividing by everything would silently dilute a genuinely bad reject rate. The tile states how many collections the figure is measured on, so you can see how much weight to put on it: a 12 % contamination rate measured on two loads is a warning to investigate, not a statistic.

Cost, rebates and cost per tonne

Enter the net cost of each collection — the gate fee, haulage and any levy, less anything the material earned. Where a load earns you money, such as baled card or scrap metal, enter the cost as a negative number. The totals net off correctly and the cost chart draws rebates in green.

The per-tonne figure is the useful one. A total tells you what you spent; a rate per tonne tells you whether you are paying a sensible price and how much a tonne moved from residual into a recycling stream is actually worth to you. Rank your contractors and streams by cost per tonne, not by total, before any contract conversation.

The overall cost per tonne on the tile includes free and rebated loads, which drags it down. That is deliberate: it is your real average cost of getting a tonne of waste off site. If you want the cost of disposal alone, filter the register to the disposal destinations and read the tile again.

Volume, containers and density

Volume, container size and container count are optional, and they answer a question weight cannot: are you paying to move air? Most waste contracts charge by lift or by container, not by weight, so a bin that leaves site a third full costs the same as a full one.

The entry preview shows the density of each load as you type it. Rough expectations: loose general waste in a skip lands around 100–150 kg per m³, dry mixed recycling around 60–100, baled card 400–500, glass 300–400, food waste 500–700, and construction rubble well over 1,000. A dry recycling load coming in at 30 kg per m³ is telling you the material is not being flattened and you are buying empty space on every lift.

The tool rejects a volume larger than the containers you have recorded could physically hold, which catches the common slip of entering the total volume in the container-size field.

Settings that change the answer

Four settings change published figures, so record what they were set to alongside any number you circulate.

• Reporting weight unit — kilograms or tonnes. Affects presentation and the cost-per-unit figures, never the rates.
• Recycling rate target — your own number. It is drawn on the monthly trend and used in the "against target" column. There is no universal correct target; set it from your own history.
• Count energy recovery as recycled — off by default, and it should normally stay off.
• Count energy recovery as diverted from landfill — on by default, because energy recovery genuinely does keep material out of landfill.

Turning the first energy-recovery setting on will lift your recycling rate, sometimes dramatically, without a single extra kilogram being recycled. Do it only if a scheme you report into defines the rate that way, and state it plainly on the report.

Quoting a rate honestly

A rate needs three things attached to it or it means nothing: the period, the scope, and the treatment of energy recovery. "68 % recycling" is not a claim. "68 % by weight of the 412 tonnes collected from the two production sites over the twelve months to the year end, energy recovery excluded" is a claim, and it is one somebody can check.

Watch for one-off loads. A single heavy construction or clear-out load, almost all of which is recycled as aggregate, can lift a whole year's rate by ten points while your day-to-day performance has not moved at all. The monthly table exists so you can see that spike rather than average it away, and the fair thing is to report the rate both with and without the one-off.

Keep the filter and the claim aligned. If you filter to one site or one quarter, everything on the screen and on the printed report is that filter — the scope line under the title states it. Clear the filters before issuing anything you describe as the whole organisation for the whole year.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot verify a single thing your contractor told you. If a load recorded as recycled was actually landfilled, this register will show it as recycled, because that is what the ticket said. Audits of the receiving site, not a spreadsheet, are what confirm that.

It does not calculate carbon. Weight diverted is not a carbon saving, and converting between them needs emission factors that vary by material, by treatment route and by country.

It does not make any regulatory return, produce a duty-of-care record, or check that your carrier is permitted to take what you gave them. It does not know which of your streams are classified as hazardous where you are, and that classification differs between countries.

Printing and sharing

Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: the header, both headline rates, the four charts, the stream summary, the monthly performance table, the full register and your closing notes. Print to PDF to circulate it.

Use the closing notes to record the things a reader needs and the numbers cannot carry: which sites are included, whether any weights were estimated, and whether any one-off load is distorting the period.

Saving your work

Collections, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It cannot tell whether a weight is accurate, whether a destination was recorded correctly, or whether a collection is missing — and every rate on the report depends on all three.

Waste classifications, duty-of-care paperwork, permitted carrier requirements, reporting duties and the definitions used for recycling and recovery rates all differ by country and by industry. Nothing here is legal advice, a regulatory submission or a substitute for professional waste management advice. Establish what applies to you and report separately.