Caerphilly secures site for new recycling depot as part of £55M switch to kerbside sort
Council purchases Dyffryn Business Park facility as part of capital investment in planned service change to the Welsh Government’s Collection Blueprint scheduled to begin in 2028.
Caerphilly County Borough Council has purchased a site at Dyffryn Business Park in Ystrad Mynach to build an operational depot and establish its own dry recycling sorting facility. The move aims to improve the county's recycling performance, which currently ranks among the lowest in Wales.
The facility would enable the council to sort dry kerbside recycling locally, replacing the current practice of sending materials to Material Reclamation Facilities across the UK. It will also take over operations from the existing facility at Tir-y-Berth.
The development, agreed by the council’s cabinet on 23 July, is part of a planned £54.8M capital investment to align the recycling service with the Welsh Government's updated Collections Blueprint.
Caerphilly was among four councils that failed to meet the 64 per cent statutory recycling target in 2023-24, recording 60.1 per cent diversion of municipal waste. Failure to improve this would potentially open the authority up to substantial annual fines.
"We are pleased to announce plans to create our very own recycling depot here within the Caerphilly County Borough," said Cllr Chris Morgan, Cabinet Member responsible for Waste and Recycling. "This major scheme will transform the way we deliver our recycling service and, subject to planning approval, work will soon commence on creating the new facility at the site."
The Welsh Government's 2025 blueprint mandates three-weekly residual waste collections, and calls for separate collection services for nappies and other absorbent hygiene products.
It also strengthens requirements for separating materials in order to meet the 70 per cent recycling target. Government modelling suggests that combining three-weekly collections with kerbside sort systems can add six per cent to recycling figures.
Alignment with Welsh Blueprint strategy
The 2025 blueprint recommends local authorities provide households with three or more containers, up from the previous two-container minimum. It also advises providing households with sufficient capacity for dry recyclables, typically between 150 litres and 250 litres per week.
The new Caerphilly depot is designed to support this new kerbside sort approach, which has proven successful in top-performing Welsh authorities.
Currently, six Welsh councils have already met the 2024-25 statutory target of 70 per cent: Bridgend, Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Vale of Glamorgan.
The Collections Blueprint emphasises that kerbside sort collection using single-pass resource recovery vehicles allows crews to reject contaminated materials at the point of collection and provide immediate feedback to residents. According to a national Welsh waste analysis cited in the blueprint, the kerbside sort model is proven to produce higher quality materials, with contamination in separately collected recycling at just 6.4 per cent, compared to 20.3 per cent for fully co-mingled systems.
"The introduction of this new site will futureproof Caerphilly's recycling services, enabling us to roll out our waste and recycling strategy and meet Welsh Government's recycling targets," Morgan added.
The proposed development at Dyffryn Business Park is subject to planning permission, with pre-application consultation scheduled for autumn 2025. 
