Open data · CC BY 4.0 · 218 authorities
Nobody knows who
runs their tip
19.2m people
live somewhere their bin council is not their tip council
That is 28.6% of the UK. Your district council empties your bins. A county council you may never have dealt with runs the recycling centre and decides what it will accept. They have separate websites, separate rules, and no obligation to mention each other.
Twelve districts, one tip authority
Every district below collects bins but does not run a recycling centre. Their residents are sent to a county council website they had no reason to look at. Kent, Essex and Lancashire carry twelve each.
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21 authorities dispose for at least one district they do not collect for. Counted from disposesForDistricts in the register.
Every row is in the open CSV.
A 714:1 gap, same legal duty
Kent and Isles of Scilly are both waste disposal authorities under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. One serves 714 times the people of the other. The bar for Isles of Scilly is not missing — it is two pixels, drawn to the same scale as the rest.
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Kent (1,589,057) divided by Isles of Scilly (2,226). Both are waste disposal authorities carrying the same duty under the Environmental Protection Act 1990.
Four nations, four different systems
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run single-tier councils that do both jobs. England is the outlier: it is the only nation where the split exists at all, and it is where every one of the districts above sits.
- England 153 authorities, 164 districts
- Scotland 32 authorities
- Wales 22 authorities
- Northern Ireland 11 authorities
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Population by nation, summed from the register. Authority counts shown beside each bar rather than on a second axis — two scales on one chart is the fastest way to mislead a reader.
47 councils where even the council is the wrong question
In London, Greater Manchester and Merseyside the disposal duty sits with a statutory joint authority — a body most residents have never heard of and cannot name. 12.8m people live under one.
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Councils in areas where a statutory joint waste authority is likely to hold the disposal function, so the council itself is probably the wrong place to ask.
How far we have actually got
The structure above is complete and comes straight from the register. What each authority ALLOWS is a different question, and we are a long way from done. Published honestly rather than rounded up.
- Read and quoted 20their own page, dated
- Link only 130page found, not read
- Nothing yet 68says nothing
Show the working
Counts generated by scripts/generate-council-dataset.mjs on 2026-10-28. "Official link" means we located the authority's own page and link to it; nobody here has read it, so no status is published for those rows.
Every row is in the open CSV.
Take the data
All 218 authorities, all 164 districts mapped to the body that disposes for them, CC BY 4.0. Use it, fork it, correct it. If you find something wrong, that is worth more to us than a link.
Authority list derived from the mySociety UK local authority register. Population figures are 2020 mid-year estimates as published in that register. Generated 2026-10-28. Nothing on this page is typed by hand — every figure is computed from the register at build time, and the arithmetic is behind each “show the working”.