By Michael Plant, Supply Chain Director of HAHN Plastics UK
The past few months have brought significant change to household waste collection, with ‘Simpler Recycling’ reforms bringing greater consistency to what is collected and how it is handled. But while attention has focused on harmonising collections, a more complex shift is fast approaching – kerbside collections for film plastics.
From March 2027, all local authorities will be required to collect flexible plastic packaging from households under the Flex Collect scheme. This means items such as plastic bags, crisp packets and food wrapping will enter the recycling stream at scale for the first time. Crucially, councils and waste operators will need to both collect these materials and ensure they can be effectively sorted and reprocessed. That raises a critical question for the sector: is the UK’s waste infrastructure ready?
Across Britain, more than 100 Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) process over 4m tonnes of material each year, forming the backbone of how household recycling is sorted and prepared for reprocessing. On paper, that suggests a system with the capacity to respond to change. In practice, the picture is far more uneven.
Much of the UK’s infrastructure is made up of smaller facilities, often designed around traditional dry recyclables such as paper, card and rigid plastics. They were not built with flexible plastics in mind, and adapting them to handle these materials is not straightforward.
Film plastics behave very differently. Being lightweight, they can be easily contaminated and are difficult to separate using conventional sorting technology – often requiring additional stages of cleaning and processing before they can be reused. This is where the current gaps in the system become clear. The challenge is not just how much we can process, but whether our infrastructure is currently capable of handling a more complex material stream at all.
Aside from looking at capacity, we need to take a long, hard look at the very structure and consistency of our industry as well. The UK’s recycling system is shaped by a mix of local authority contracts and private waste operators, each with its own approach to how MRFs are designed and run. As a result, infrastructure varies significantly across the country, from the technologies in place to the types of materials facilities are able to handle. This lack of uniformity presents a real challenge as film collections are introduced at a national level.
While some facilities may be able to adapt, others will require more fundamental upgrades, creating an uneven playing field in how materials are processed. Without greater alignment, a standardised collection system risks feeding into a fragmented processing network.
Germany offers a useful point of comparison. There, recycling systems have been developed in a far more
co-ordinated way, with investment across collection, sorting and reprocessing aligned from the outset. This has enabled the infrastructure to evolve alongside policy, rather than lag behind it, and has helped create a system better equipped to handle more complex materials such as flexible plastics.
What is needed now is a more co-ordinated national approach to infrastructure development. That means bringing together local authorities, waste operators and processors to ensure investment is directed in a consistent and strategic way, so that the system evolves as a whole rather than in isolated parts. This must be supported by meaningful government investment.
If the UK is serious about meeting its net zero ambitions, the UK’s recycling system must be recognised as critical national infrastructure, on par with energy and transport. Only then can the sector process film plastics at scale. Without targeted investment, there is a risk the system captures more film plastics than it can effectively recycle, placing increasing pressure on facilities that are not yet equipped to handle them at scale.
The next phase of reform must therefore focus as much on infrastructure as it does on collection. Investment in sorting, cleaning and processing capacity must happen now, and in a way that ensures the system develops consistently across the country.
Flex Collect represents a significant opportunity to reduce waste going into landfill, but for it to succeed, it must be supported by the right foundations. As well as it being about collecting more material, closing the loop is about ensuring we have the infrastructure to turn it back into something of value.
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