Resources and waste strategy

One of the biggest challenges we face is how to manage our resources, materials and waste. 

Cornwall needs to work together on this if we are to protect our natural environment and create a thriving sustainable Cornwall for all. 

It’s important that we all recycle as much as we can. You've already helped to raise Cornwall’s recycling rates to 44% for 2024-2025. You did this by getting behind the changes we made to Cornwall's waste services last year. You made the new food waste, recycling and rubbish collection a success. 

But the Government has set some ambitious new targets. To achieve them our focus now must be on reducing the amount of waste we produce. 

We’re committed to helping people in Cornwall to do that. 

We've written a new Resources and Waste Strategy 2025. It builds on our Waste Strategy from 2018 and uses your feedback from our 2024 survey.

Read the Resources and Waste Strategy 

It shows how we plan to deliver Cornwall’s waste services to meet national policy. It also gives a timetable for those changes. 

The strategy follows five key principles:

1. Keep developing and improving Cornwall’s waste services in line with the waste hierarchy. This means we’ll prioritise the waste services we provide in order of what's best for the environment:
   
   
   • Prevention: The best approach is to avoid creating waste in the first place
     
     
   • Repair: Give broken or damaged things a longer life
     
     
   • Prepare for Reuse: If you can't prevent waste, find ways to use items again in their original form
     
     
   • Recycle: Turn waste materials into new products
     
     
   • Recovery: Extract value from waste, such as energy generation
     
     
   • Disposal: As a last resort, materials that can't be reused, recycled or recovered for energy will be incinerated without energy recovery or landfilled
     
     
2. Meet government targets. They include recycle or compost 65% of household waste by 2035 and limit rubbish to 287 kg per person by 2042.
   
   
3. Provide value for money waste services.
   
   
4. Reduce the carbon footprint of Cornwall's waste services.
   
   
5. Keep educating and improving resource and waste awareness in our communities, empowering residents, visitors and businesses to use our services and make informed and sustainable choices.