Wonder where skip waste actually goes after the lorry drives off? Most of it doesn't go to landfill. Around 92% of UK construction and demolition waste is now recycled or recovered (DEFRA), but the headline hides a lot of variation. Mixed household and trade skip waste recycling, your typical 6-yard or 8-yard, sits closer to 65–80%, depending on the operator and transfer station.
TL;DR
- Around 92% of UK construction and demolition waste is recycled or recovered (DEFRA), but mixed household skip waste typically lands at 65–80%.
- Of the 92% figure, 70% is recycled into new products, 15% recovered for energy, 5% reused, and 8% landfilled.
- Recovery depends on sorting: a modern Materials Recovery Facility can hit 85% from mixed waste; a smaller manual-sort site around 60%.
- Source segregation, operator choice, and Landfill Tax (£103.70/tonne in 2026) are the biggest swing factors.
This guide walks through where your skip's contents actually go, by material, and what decides whether they're recycled or landfilled.
Headline UK construction and demolition recovery sits around 92%, but mixed household skip waste typically lands at 65–80%. The biggest swing factors are source segregation and the operator's transfer-station capability.
The journey from skip to disposal
Every skip follows roughly the same route:
- Collection. The lorry drives to the operator's nearest licensed transfer facility.
- Tipping. The skip is emptied, weighed, and recorded against the waste-transfer note.
- Sorting. Mixed waste is sorted, by hand, mechanical separation, or both.
- Onward processing. Each stream goes to its destination, recycling, energy-from-waste, or landfill.
Recovery depends almost entirely on how thoroughly the transfer station sorts. A modern Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) can hit 85% from mixed waste. A smaller manual-sort site might manage 60%.
What's actually in a typical UK skip?
Average composition across domestic and light-trade hires:
| Stream | Share | Typical recovery rate |
|---|---|---|
| Construction materials (brick, concrete, tile, plaster) | 25–35% | 90%+ |
| Wood and timber | 15–25% | 85–90% |
| General mixed waste (packaging, fabric, soft furnishings) | 15–25% | 40–60% |
| Soil and aggregate | 10–20% | 95%+ |
| Metal | 5–10% | 97%+ |
| Plastics | 5–10% | 30–50% |
| Other (glass, electronics, residuals) | 5–10% | Varies |
Each stream has very different economics, and different destinations.
Stream-by-stream destinations
Brick, concrete, tile, plaster
The largest single stream and one of the strongest performers. Crushed and sorted into recycled aggregate (road sub-base, foundations, drainage), recycled concrete (non-structural uses), and brick fines (landscaping, pathways). Some plaster goes to landfill where contamination makes recovery uneconomic, but most transfer stations now handle plasterboard separately.
Wood and timber
Sorted into grades:
| Grade | Description | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| A | Clean wood | Wood chip for animal bedding or biomass fuel |
| B | Mixed wood | Chipboard or MDF panel-board manufacture |
| C | Treated or contaminated | Energy-from-waste plants |
| D | Heavily treated (e.g. railway sleepers) | Specialist disposal |
Wood recovery rose from around 65% in 2010 to 85–90% today, one of the bigger sustainability wins in UK waste management.
General mixed waste
The hardest stream and the source of most landfill. Mixed packaging, fabric, soft furnishings, and miscellaneous household waste is hand-sorted into recyclable cardboard and plastic (~30%), combustible material for energy-from-waste (25–35%), and residual landfill (the rest).
Better source separation is the single biggest lever for pushing recovery up. That's why segregation rules exist.
Soil and aggregate
Strong recovery. Clean soil goes to land regeneration (brownfield reclamation, contaminated-land capping), landscaping fill (golf courses, garden development), and engineering use (embankments, road construction). Contaminated soil (oil, chemicals, asbestos fibres) needs specialist handling and a small share goes to controlled landfill.
Metal
Almost everything recovered. Metal funds its own recovery, scrap value is what makes it economic. It goes through scrap merchants into new steel (rebar, structural sections), new aluminium, and smaller mixed-metal applications. Near-100% recycled in the UK for decades.
Plastics
The worst-performing stream. Mixed plastics are hard to recycle because multiple polymer types are mixed together, contamination reduces resin quality, soft plastics (film, wrap) are hard to mechanically sort, and end-of-life products often have additives that limit recyclability.
What's recovered goes mostly to chemical recycling or energy-from-waste. The rest goes to landfill or to specialised plastic-recovery facilities operating at smaller scale.
What does "recycled or recovered" actually mean?
The DEFRA 92% figure includes everything that doesn't go to landfill. The split looks like this:
| Category | Share |
|---|---|
| Recycled (turned into new products) | 70% |
| Recovered for energy (energy-from-waste) | 15% |
| Reused or used in remediation | 5% |
| Landfilled | 8% |
| Other (composted, etc.) | 2% |
For households, the nuance is that "92% recovered" doesn't mean "92% turned into new things." It means 92% diverted from landfill, meaningful environmental progress, but not the same as a 92% recycling rate.
What pushes skip recycling rates higher?
For deeper context on UK construction waste streams, see the 2026 UK construction waste report.
Three factors most significantly improve any individual skip's recovery rate:
1. Segregation at source. Plasterboard, hazardous items, and recyclables separated before they go in the skip means the transfer station can sort more effectively.
2. The choice of operator. Operators using modern MRFs achieve recovery rates 15–25 points higher than those using older transfer stations. Asking your operator what their recovery rate is, and where waste goes, is a reasonable question.
3. Landfill tax. UK Landfill Tax sits at £103.70/tonne in 2026 and rises annually. The cost gap between landfilling and recycling is what funds recovery infrastructure, the higher the tax, the more economic recovery becomes.
What pushes the rate lower
Three things drag recovery down:
1. Contamination. A skip with food waste, hazardous chemicals, or plasterboard mixed in becomes harder and more expensive to sort. The transfer station may divert the entire load to lower-grade processing.
2. Smaller transfer stations. Operators in rural or low-density areas often use smaller manual-sorting facilities. Recovery rates 15–25 points lower than urban facilities.
3. Mixed plastic and soft furnishings. No effective recycling pathway exists for many of these at scale. The best they get is energy-from-waste; the worst, landfill.
How household habits affect the rate
Three things you can do as a customer that meaningfully shift your skip's recovery rate:
- Segregate plasterboard. Use a separate plasterboard skip or take it to a council recycling centre. Mixing plasterboard into general waste contaminates the load.
- Keep hazardous items out. Paint, batteries, fridges, fluorescent tubes, all have free disposal routes that lead to higher recovery than mixed-skip processing.
- Don't pre-bag clean cardboard. Loose cardboard in a skip is easy to recover; cardboard inside a black bag is often missed during sorting.
The full prohibited-items list is in the prohibited-items guide.
Tracking and reporting
Under Section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, every skip movement gets a waste-transfer note (WTN) recording the waste type (with EWC code), volume or weight, origin and destination, and carrier and producer details.
For trade, these accumulate into Section 34 compliance records. For domestic users, the operator usually retains the WTN and provides a copy on request.
The destination is recorded but not always visible to customers. Operators committed to transparency publish recovery rates and destination data. Worth asking.
A short citation note
Figures here are drawn from DEFRA's UK Statistics on Waste, the WRAP Construction Sector Resource Use report, and Environment Agency public data on permitted waste facilities. The 92% C&D recovery figure is from the most recent DEFRA dataset; mixed-waste recovery rates vary by source and methodology. Ranges reflect variation across regional waste-management areas.
For the most current figures, DEFRA's UK Statistics on Waste is updated annually and freely available.
