Understanding the Household Waste Diversion Calculator
Waste diversion rate measures how much of your household's waste is kept out of the landfill through recycling and composting, instead of being thrown away as regular trash. It is the standard metric that municipal recycling programs, zero-waste initiatives, and sustainability reports use to track progress, and you can apply the same formula at home with a kitchen scale or a rough weight estimate.
The formula
The diversion rate is calculated as:
Diversion rate = (Recycled + Composted) ÷ (Recycled + Composted + Landfill trash) × 100
The numerator, "diverted waste," is everything you keep out of the landfill — curbside or drop-off recycling plus any composted food scraps and yard waste. The denominator, "total waste generated," adds in whatever still goes to the landfill or incinerator as regular garbage. A household that recycles 15 lb and composts 8 lb in a week, while sending 20 lb to the landfill, generates 43 lb of total waste and diverts 23 lb, for a diversion rate of 23 ÷ 43 × 100 ≈ 53.5%.
Understanding the inputs
Weigh (or estimate) each stream for a typical week: Recycled per week covers paper, cardboard, glass, metal, and plastics accepted by your local recycling program. Composted per week covers food scraps and yard waste diverted to a compost bin, curbside compost pickup, or municipal drop-off. Landfill trash per week is everything placed in the regular garbage bin with no recovery path. Household size is used only to compute landfill waste on a per-person basis, so you can compare your footprint to other households of different sizes.
Interpreting the results
The diversion rate is the headline number — the higher it is, the more of your waste is being recovered rather than landfilled. Total waste generated and waste diverted show the raw weekly weights behind that percentage, so you can see whether a low rate is due to too little recycling/composting or simply a lot of landfill trash. Landfill waste per person normalizes your trash output by household size, which is useful for comparing your habits over time or against published per-capita benchmarks.