Description

I verified that the data is open from the website that I got the data. The website that I got the code, https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/household-waste-recycling-rates-borough, is part of the London Datastore which describes itself as “a free and open data-sharing portal.”

Table

library(readxl)
household_recycling_borough <- read_excel("Desktop/household-recycling-borough.xls", 
    sheet = "Household Recycling Rates")
recycling_nona <- household_recycling_borough %>%
  filter(!is.na(Area))
recycling_columns <- recycling_nona %>%
  select(c(Area, "2013/14", "2014/15", "2015/16", "2016/17", "2017/18")) %>% top_n(5) 
## Selecting by 2017/18
library(knitr)
kable(recycling_columns, digits = 2, caption = "Current Top 5 London Boroughs Recycling Rates Over Last 5 Years")
Current Top 5 London Boroughs Recycling Rates Over Last 5 Years
Area 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18
Bexley 55.2 54.0 52.0 52.7 52.06
Bromley 49.6 48.0 46.3 46.9 49.99
Sutton 37.1 37.6 34.7 36.5 50.05
East 49.3 49.3 49.3 49.4 48.97
South West 46.7 47.6 47.6 48.3 49.04

Charts

recycling_long <- recycling_columns %>%
rename("2013" = "2013/14")%>%
rename("2014" = "2014/15")%>%
rename("2015" = "2015/16")%>%
rename("2016" = "2016/17")%>%
rename("2017" = "2017/18")%>%
gather(key = "Year", value = "Recycling", 2:6)
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(recycling_long, aes(x = Year, y = Recycling, color = Area)) + geom_point() + geom_line(aes(group = Area)) + ggtitle("Current Top 5 London Boroughs Recycling Rates Over Last 5 Years")

recycling_2017 <- subset(recycling_long, Year == 2017)
ggplot(recycling_2017, aes(x = Area, y = Recycling)) + geom_col(aes(group = Area, color = Area)) + ggtitle("Top 5 Recycling Rates of London Boroughs in 2017")

Narrative

I found it interesting that some of the recycling rates have gone significantly down over the years, but Sutton has increased their rate of recycling dramatically. I also thought the concept of open data versus public data was interesting, because I had previously thought of public data as open data. I had a couple of issues creating this report. The first issue was I struggled to import the Excel data into RStudio. I then had a hard time figuring out how to make a line graph of the table data.