MORE than half of collected rubbish in Somerset is recycled - beating the 50% target set by the Government for 2020, according to data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

In 2016-2017, the council recycled or composted 137,582 tonnes of all waste, about 50.7% of the overall collected.

These figures are better than two years ago, when 50.2% of the rubbish was recycled.

The data includes the rubbish made up of everyday items that are disposed of by the public at home or on the go.

England recycled on average 42.7% of the waste produced over the last year.

Mickey Green, managing director of Somerset Waste Partnership, said: "While I am incredibly grateful to local people, along with our collection and recycling centre teams, for our success in staying among the top 20% of local authorities in England, there’s no room for complacency.

"We can be proud that we collect recycling in a way that guarantees it gets recycled, that we do the right thing for the environment and the economy by recycling over 90% of materials here in the UK with half recycled in Somerset, and that we were the first local authority to openly publish details of what happens to all our recycling in our annual End Use Register each year.

"But we’ll be pushing forward, with new materials - including food packaging pots, tubs and trays, cartons, batteries and small electrical items - being rolled out to kerbside collections from 2020, and three weekly collections of emptier rubbish bins.

"With these changes we’ll collect much more for recycling, driving well past the 50% target to 60% and beyond."

Incineration plants burnt 2% of the rubbish produced in the council, the figures show.

The vast majority of it was sent to specialist Energy-from-Waste (EfW) power plants as fuel to generate heat and electricity.

Somerset sent 121,363 tonnes of waste to landfills in 2016-2017 - about 45% of the total.

The Government aims to cut to 35% the proportion of rubbish going to landfill by 2020.

These targets are part of a new strategy drawn up by the European Union and backed up by Theresa May's Cabinet in April.

But Shlomo Dowen, national coordinator of United Kingdom Without Incineration Network (UKWIN), says many materials which could be recycled are still being incinerated.

He said: "Unfortunately councils are reacting too slowly to the growing public demand for more recycling and less incineration.

"The introduction of an incineration tax would send a clear message to councils and businesses that incineration is not the way forward.

"Money raised through an incineration tax can be spent on better local recycling and re-use schemes.

"Across the UK there is more than 19 million tonnes of residual waste treatment capacity operational or under construction, but forecasts indicate that by 2030 there will only be around 10 million tonnes of residual waste available for treatment.

"This means that we are already facing an overcapacity of incineration that is harming recycling.

"The real choice is not between incineration and landfill, but between incineration and recycling."

Baroness Jones, a Green Party member of the House of Lords, said: "We need to build more of our own infrastructure in order to recycle and deal with our own waste.

"The ban on recycled waste going to China has inevitably lead to a UK pile up and that could bring forward the moment when our recycling gets treated as a fuel, rather than a valuable resource.

"Post Brexit we need to come up with new rules that ensure that a certain proportion of material in key products includes recycled materials. This would create a market for the recycled goods and encourage industry to invest."