From food packaging to washing detergent pouches, flexible plastic packaging is an increasingly common feature of everyday life. This rising use is commonly explained as part of well-meaning moves to lightweight products, shrink carbon footprints, and reduce the overall use of plastics, but despite these intentions, only a small fraction of flexible plastic packaging is recycled. In this article, Dr Torik Holmes highlights research from the first ‘Everyday Flexible Plastic Packaging Recycling Assembly’ and discusses required policy actions.

• UK policy urgently needs to address the contraction in recycling capacity.
• Waste policy reforms are set to generate funds – but distributing these to local authorities could still lead to further contraction of recycling infrastructure.
• Joined-up, robust policy and planning approaches are required to deliver the infrastructural capacity required to improve UK plastic packaging recycling and to progress circularity and net zero.

The state of plastic packaging policy and UK recycling infrastructure

Flexible plastic packaging represents more than 27% of all UK consumer plastic packaging. But only 7% is currently recycled. Estimates show that over 215 billion items of flexible plastic packaging, equalling 895 thousand tonnes, is placed on the market each year in the UK.

After years of consultations and delays following the publication of Our waste, our resources: a strategy for England, policy change is afoot across the UK. This includes the scheduled rollout of Simpler Recycling across 2026/27, which is aimed at standardising the set of recyclable materials collected from homes and businesses.

By March 2027, this is to include the kerbside collection of flexibles. This will result in a vast quantity of flexible plastic packaging (previously landfilled or incinerated) being collected.

The rollout of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) dovetails with Simpler Recycling. Coming into full effect over the next few years, EPR aims to ensure producers cover the costs of recycling.

Aims versus infrastructural inadequacies

UK waste policy reforms ‘are estimated to help stimulate £10 billion of investment in recycling infrastructure’. Whether or not this will happen, and in what form and scale infrastructural investment will take shape, are hot topics of debate.

It is accepted that current UK recycling capacity is inadequate. Worse still, capacity is contracting, rather than expanding in line with anticipated demand.

Estimates suggest around ‘260 K tonnes of [UK] recycling capacity lost per year since 2022’. This is worrying as contracting infrastructural capacity means that harder-to-recycle plastics, including flexible plastic packaging formats, are even less desirable to tackle.

Addressing infrastructural contraction – insights from research engagement

A research engagement initiative at The University of Manchester gathered stakeholders from across the plastic packaging value chain. We held three interlinked sessions, focused on eliciting discussion on organisational challenges, priorities, and desired responses needed to improve UK flexible plastic packaging recycling.

Our sessions suggested UK policy needs to pay greater attention to infrastructural contraction and to address this via more robust and joined-up approaches to waste governance.

Crucially, it is not clear that funds produced through EPR will be ploughed back into recycling infrastructure, particularly that crucial to the reprocessing of materials and where the issue with infrastructural contraction is acute.

This is because EPR funds are set to be distributed to local authorities, not recyclers. Accordingly, while collection and sorting infrastructure are likely to improve (this is what local authorities are primarily in charge of), the impact on UK infrastructure involved in the actual recycling of plastic packaging (such as mechanical and chemical recycling plants), is harder to forecast.

Moreover, while it is easier to foresee investment in collection and sorting infrastructure, the extent to which this will happen and in what forms remains uncertain and set to differ from one local authority to the next.

Pressures and inconsistencies

There are two reasons for this uncertainty and local variation. Firstly, the funds allocated to local authorities from EPR are not ringfenced for waste management and recycling, meaning they may well end up funding other services.

Secondly, Simpler Recycling allows for localised interpretation and implementation, with ‘councils and other waste collectors [having] the flexibility to make the best choices to suit local need’. This leaves scope for the rollout of Simpler Recycling to involve and maintain troubling, localised inconsistencies concerning collection and sorting.

With different approaches to collecting and sorting remaining a feature of waste and recycling, there is a heightened likelihood that a problematic diversity—in terms of the mix, quantity, and quality of plastics captured for recycling—will be maintained. This is particularly problematic as cleaner waste streams carry with them economies of scale that benefit infrastructural investment.

Recommendations to strengthen UK recycling infrastructure

Based on these research findings, two related policy recommendations are crucial to strengthening UK plastic packaging recycling.

Firstly, the funding generated from UK waste policy reforms needs to be ringfenced for investment in sorting, collecting, and critically, reprocessing infrastructure. Moreover, money should not just go to local authorities for improving collection and sorting; it must also improve and upscale UK reprocessing capacity. Adequate collection and sorting need to be matched with sufficient reprocessing infrastructure.

Secondly, a more joined-up and explicit approach to UK waste policy and infrastructure planning is recommended. While reforms will produce significant funds and consensus exists on investing in infrastructure, what this will and should look like in practice is unclear.

Simpler Recycling and EPR will not eliminate local variation in waste collection. Moreover, the UK Government’s 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy lacks detail on the size, scope, and standard of recycling infrastructure needed to meet resource circularity and net zero goals. A dedicated 10-year national strategy, drawing on the resources and expertise of DEFRA, the Environment Agency, The National Infrastructure Commission, local authorities, The Circular Economy Taskforce, and industry stakeholders would provide valuable clarity on what the UK is working toward.

Time is of the essence. UK plastics recycling capacity is contracting. Soon a glut of flexible plastic packaging will be collected and sorted. Much of this will likely remain unrecycled unless a more robust, joined-up approach to waste governance is applied.