Image inspiration - René Magritte - link
The announcement that mandatory household collections of flexible plastic packaging in England will now be delayed until 2030 has understandably disappointed many organisations that have invested significant time and effort promoting packaging recyclability. Others, particularly within local government and parts of the waste management industry have in turn argued that the additional time is necessary because the collection, sorting and reprocessing infrastructure is simply not yet ready. Perhaps both sides are focusing on the wrong question?
Instead of asking how quickly can we collect flexible plastics, maybe we should be asking whether mixed household flexible plastics should ever have been considered a mainstream recyclable material in the first place?
For years, policy has moved steadily towards expanding household recycling collections to include more materials; an attractive ambition but ambition alone doesn't create a circular economy as ultimately, recycling depends on more than collection; it requires consistent feedstock, viable reprocessing and reliable end markets for the recycled material, and that's where flexible plastics become challenging.
According to WRAP, flexible plastic packaging accounts for more than a quarter of consumer plastic packaging placed on the UK market but only around 7% is currently recycled. WRAP identifies multiple reasons including packaging design, limited collection infrastructure, sorting challenges, insufficient reprocessing capacity and underdeveloped end markets which indicates that the challenge extends far beyond simply asking households to put more material into their recycling bin.
Compared with relatively well established bottle waste streams such as PET and HDPE, mixed household flexible plastics are much lighter, made from many different plastic types and significantly harder to sort into consistent recycling feedstock. Even where they are successfully recycled, much of the resulting material is currently used in products such as refuse sacks, drainage products, agricultural applications and construction products rather than returning to equivalent food contact packaging and whilst there's absolutely nothing wrong with those products; they all represent genuine recycling and have an important role to play but do they demonstrate a mature circular economy or simply illustrate the current limitations of the market itself?
Extended Producer Responsibility will undoubtedly change who pays for managing packaging waste and it should, in time, encourage better packaging design but changing who funds a recycling system doesn't automatically create domestic reprocessing capacity or robust commercial demand for the recyclate that it produces. Those remain separate challenges and this raises what I believe is the more important policy question.
If nationwide household collections require significant new investment in collection systems, sorting facilities, reprocessing infrastructure and continuing producer support, shouldn't the government firstly demonstrate that those investments deliver greater environmental benefit than alternative approaches such as better packaging design, waste prevention, reuse systems or focusing resources on materials where mature closed loop markets already exist? All things considered, public policy shouldn't simply be about increasing recycling tonnages; in reality, shouldn't it be about achieving the greatest environmental benefit from finite resources?
None of this is an argument against flexible plastics themselves. In many applications they reduce packaging weight, help protect products and extend shelf life, potentially preventing food waste. Neither is this an argument against specialist recycling companies recovering clean, consistent flexible plastic streams. It is, however, a challenge to the assumption that every flexible plastic package naturally belongs within a universal household recycling system?
Perhaps mixed household flexible plastics are better regarded as specialist materials requiring specialist collection and specialist reprocessing, funded/subsidised appropriately by those placing them on the market and/or using them, rather than assuming they can simply be added to mainstream kerbside collections.
The decision to delay household collections until 2030 may therefore represent something other than a lack of ambition. It may unintentionally reflect an acknowledgement that collection infrastructure alone cannot create a circular economy.
In my opinion, the real test of successful recycling isn't how much material we collect, it's whether we can consistently transform that material into products for which there is genuine, sustainable demand and I'd welcome informed debate on that proposition. WRAP - link - more like this (soft plastics) - link - more like this (WRAP) - link
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