Finishing touches
Then we really got crunchy with the numbers. To give each county a recycling score, we had to factor in their budget.
By combining 2018 county-by-county population figures with each county's gross expenditure for 2019/20 (or 2018/19 if not available - all sources below), we calculated the gross expenditure per head for every English county.
The finishing touch? A quick bit of division. For each county, we divided its initial score (1-12) by its budget per head to create an adjusted recycling policy score.
These scores range from 2 to 13, which doesn't mean an awful lot, so we assigned a school-style grading system:
