Surrey Environment Partnership
The client
Surrey Environment Partnership is Surrey County Council and the county’s 11 district and borough councils working together on waste and recycling. Its website is where Surrey residents go to find out what to do with something they no longer want, from a pizza box to a broken kettle, and it carries each council’s own collection rules alongside county-wide advice.
The brief
The SEP website had grown to more than 230 pages organised around bin types, but residents know what their item is, not which bin it belongs in. We were asked to restructure the site around items instead, with a new set of “Can you recycle…?” pages at its centre, and to do it inside the existing WordPress site rather than as a full redesign. It also had to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, the accessibility standard public sector sites are held to.
- Information architecture
- WordPress plugin development
- Icon design
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)
- Redirects and SEO
- Speed and housekeeping
154
Items across nine “Can you recycle…?” pages, each with its own disposal icons and local rules.
13 to 1
High-impact accessibility issues: 13 in the council’s 2025 audit of the old site, 1 in the council’s audit of the new one, a PDF supplied outside the build.
0
Automated WCAG 2.2 AA failures across all 186 pages and posts, tested on desktop and mobile before launch.
-67%
Home page weight on a phone, from 4.5 MB to 1.5 MB, with half the number of files to load.
01. Can you recycle…?
Each of the nine pages starts with the Surrey Recycles postcode search, then lists every common item in that category, grouped by material. Under each item is a row of icons, one for each way to get rid of it: kerbside bin, recycling centre, bank, charity shop and so on. Tap, click or tab to an icon and a short note opens with what to do. Rules that only apply in some council areas sit inside that note, at the point they matter, instead of as footnotes at the bottom of the page.
Behind the pages is a small WordPress plugin we wrote for the job. Items and disposal routes are entered once and reused, so when a rule changes, the council team edits it in one place and every page that uses it updates.
What we did
- Nine category pages covering 154 items, from batteries and bathroom waste to food and drink packaging
- A set of 24 disposal icons, drawn and adapted to read clearly at small sizes
- Pop-ups that open on tap, click or keyboard, never on hover, so they work on phones and for keyboard and screen reader users
- An on-page filter, so residents can type “foil” and see only what matches
- Items grouped under visible material headings rather than hidden in accordions
- Custom plugin with no page builder dependency, so the council team can add and edit items in WordPress
02. A simpler site
Restructuring around items meant taking the rest of the site apart and putting it back together. We worked from the partnership’s new sitemap to rebuild the landing pages and navigation, retired the pages that no longer had a place, and made sure every old address still took people somewhere useful.
Structure and content
- Published pages cut from 236 to 85, with 151 retired pages kept as drafts rather than deleted
- New landing pages for each section, with icon cards that match the page heroes
- Navigation rebuilt around the new sitemap
- Legacy “See also” panels restyled to match the new pages
- Search titles and descriptions written for the key pages
Redirects
- Redirect map agreed with the council, row by row
- 190 redirects, with old redirect chains and a redirect loop removed
- Old addresses with tracking codes on the end now reach the right page instead of an error
- All 347 old and current addresses checked on the finished site before launch
Housekeeping
- Slider Revolution header retired and replaced with a lighter, accessible header
- Unused plugins switched off after checking every page, post and widget, including a dead analytics tag
- Content moved off retired shortcode plugins
03. Accessibility and speed
Public sector websites have to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. We re-tested every point from the council’s 2025 audit against the new build, ran automated checks on every page and post at desktop and phone sizes, and fixed what we found, much of it in the site’s existing theme rather than in our new pages. We then wrote the site’s accessibility statement. The council’s own accessibility audit before launch found one high-impact issue, a PDF supplied outside the build.
Retiring the old slider and the unused plugins also made the site lighter. The home page now loads a third of the data it did, from half the number of files.
Accessibility
- Built and tested to WCAG 2.2 AA
- All 63 points from the council’s 2025 audit re-tested on the new build
- Menu text contrast fixed on every page, and visible keyboard focus throughout
- Correct page language, table headers and image alternatives across the site
- Zero automated failures across 186 pages and posts at desktop and phone sizes
- Accessibility statement written for the council
Speed
- Home page from 4.5 MB to 1.5 MB, and from 124 files to 63
- Main content on the home page shown three times sooner on a phone in testing
- Across five key pages, a third less to download on average and a third fewer files
The result
The new site went live in October 2026. Residents can now start from the thing in their hand, see every way to deal with it in one place, and get their own council’s rules without reading a page of footnotes. The partnership has a smaller site to look after, a structured list of items it can keep up to date itself, and an accessibility statement it can stand behind. You can view the website here >
In numbers
- 9 “Can you recycle…?” pages and 154 items
- 24 disposal icons
- Published pages cut from 236 to 85
- 190 redirects, all 347 addresses checked
- High-impact accessibility issues down from 13 to 1
- Zero automated WCAG 2.2 AA failures at launch
- Home page two-thirds lighter
Sources: accessibility figures from the council’s 2025 audit, PRE’s re-test in September 2026 and the council’s audit of 7 October 2026. Speed figures from Lighthouse on the live site on launch day, before and after the switch, middle of three runs.