Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy

South Tyne and Wear Waste Management Partnership

Over recent years, the way we've been able to dispose your household waste has changed. Land filling waste was a waste of money, wastes valuable resources, and above all has a damaging effect on our environment.

In 2007, South Tyne and Wear Waste Management Partnership agreed a twenty-year Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy (JMWMS) which covers the management of municipal waste for the period 2007-2027. By working together, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland councils sought to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill sites every year and increase recycling.

Recycling

All households can now recycle a wider range of materials from home including:

plastic bottles
paper
cardboard
glass bottles and jars
metal tins and cans.

We've also improved our household waste and recycling centre services.

Non recycled rubbish

Since 2014, the partnership has sent your non-recycled rubbish to our Energy-from-Waste (EfW) facility on Teesside. The facility uses a high-tech burning process to convert the waste into electricity for the National Grid.

The significant successes that have been achieved over recent years has meant that we needed to update our JMWMS. The refreshed JMWMS has been designed to:

be easy to understand, follow, and enable progress to be monitored
consider the context of partner authority waste services within the current financial climate and other restrictions on service delivery
be clear about the priorities and not commit partner authorities to deliver actions with unknown external outcomes and/or influences
be proportionate and realistic about issues that the partnership can directly influence at different levels, for example, nationally; within our own operational activities; and across other services within our own councils