A new report landed recently that I would encourage anyone working in plastics reprocessing to read, whether or not flexibles are your material.
A new report on flexible plastic packaging recycling landed this month, and I would encourage anyone working in plastics reprocessing to read it, whether or not flexibles are your material.
The Second Everyday Flexible Plastic Packaging Recycling Assembly, Making Sustainable End Markets a Reality: An Urgent Call for Greater Strategic Direction was published on 10 August by Dr Torik Holmes at the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute. It brings together voices from right across the value chain: waste management companies, material recovery facilities, local authorities, retailers, brands, mechanical and chemical recyclers, start ups and academia. The central message is in the title. The UK needs greater strategic direction from government if plastic packaging recycling is going to work at scale by 2030.
The timing matters. During the preparation of the report, Defra confirmed on 16 July that mandatory kerbside collection of plastic films and flexibles in England would be pushed back three years, from March 2027 to 1 April 2030. Scotland and Wales have not followed. The stated reason was industry concern about viable end markets and the readiness of sorting and reprocessing infrastructure.
So we now have a material that makes up more than a quarter of UK consumer plastic packaging, roughly 215 billion items and close to 895,000 tonnes placed on the market every year, of which around 7 per cent is recycled. And the policy instrument designed to fix collection has been deferred because the thing at the other end of the pipe is not ready.
Why a rigids reprocessor is reading a flexibles recycling report
At IPL Brightgreen we process post consumer and post industrial polypropylene and HDPE. Rigids. Bottles, crates, pots, tubs and trays. On paper, flexibles are somebody else’s problem.
In practice they are not, for two reasons.
The first is contamination. Film does not stay in its own lane. It arrives in our feedstock whether or not anyone intended it to, and every gram of it is a quality risk that has to be designed out, sorted out or washed out before material reaches a customer specification. A national collection system that captures flexibles properly is, from where I sit, a rigids quality improvement as much as a flexibles win.
The second is credibility. The recycling industry is judged as a single entity. When a household is told to collect a material and then discovers it has been exported, incinerated or landfilled, the trust that is lost does not attach neatly to the responsible segment of the value chain. It attaches to all of us. That is why the report’s framing around end markets, rather than collection targets, is the right one.
What “end market” actually means on a plant floor
There is a version of the end market conversation that stays at the level of policy and finance. There is another version that happens in a laboratory and a quality office, and it is the one I recognise.
An end market is not created by a piece of legislation. It is created when a converter or a brand can specify recycled polymer with the same confidence they specify virgin, and be right about it consignment after consignment. That means melt flow index within a stated tolerance. It means colour and odour that behave predictably. It means moisture, ash and contamination levels that hold. It means documentation, traceability back to feedstock, and a technical relationship where a customer can pick up the phone about a batch and get a straight answer within the hour.
We have spent years building that on rigid PP and HDPE. It is slow, unglamorous work. It is also the only foundation an end market has ever had.
Flexibles face a harder version of the same task. Multi material laminates and printed films deliver genuine performance benefits in packaging, and those same properties complicate both mechanical and chemical recycling. Recycled flexible polymer is then asked to compete on price with virgin resin produced at enormous scale in highly optimised plants. That is not a level contest, and pretending otherwise has not served the sector well.
The July update to the Recyclability Assessment Methodology, which I understand now rates flexibles as red for kerbside recyclability, sits awkwardly alongside a mandate to collect them. Contradictory signals are expensive for anyone trying to build a business case.
The innovator’s problem is not ideas, it is certainty
I would push back gently on one common reading of the delay, which is that industry asked for more time. Some parts of the sector did. Others, including the British Plastics Federation and the Flexible Plastic Fund, have been clear that shifting the date undermines investor confidence in exactly the infrastructure the delay was meant to allow time to build.
Both things can be true, and the report identifies why. Its recommendations centre on prioritising the production and uptake of recycled feedstocks, halting the loss of infrastructural capacity, and making sustainability pay. That last point deserves attention from anyone who has tried to fund a reprocessing line. High operating costs, competition from cheap imported material and the comparatively easy economics of exporting waste all suppress appetite for domestic investment. The report’s suggestion of low interest loans or subsidies is a recognition that innovation does not happen in a vacuum. It happens where the commercial conditions permit a business to take a risk and survive being wrong occasionally.
Capacity is the part that worries me most, because it is not symmetrical. A line that closes, a site that changes use, a team of trained operators that disperses: none of that reappears in 2029 because a deadline has arrived. Infrastructure contracts quickly and rebuilds slowly.
What we would offer to the conversation
There are things the rigids side has learned that transfer.
Closed loop supply arrangements, where material comes back from a known source under a known specification, remove more quality variables than any single piece of sorting equipment. Our own buy back arrangements exist for that reason. Design for recyclability conversations held early with a brand are worth more than any amount of downstream ingenuity. And a specification that a customer helped write is a specification a customer trusts.
None of that solves laminates. It does suggest that the flexibles end market will be built the same way the rigids one was, which is one demanding customer at a time, on evidence.
Three years, used properly
The delay has created a window. Used well, it funds sorting and reprocessing capacity, resolves the contradiction between recyclability assessments and collection mandates, and builds demand side pull through procurement and recycled content requirements rather than relying on collection alone. Used badly, it becomes three years of deferred decisions and a 2030 deadline that arrives to find the UK no better prepared than it was in 2026.
Dr Holmes and the assembly participants have set out what the first version looks like. The report is open access under a Creative Commons licence and worth an hour of anyone’s time.
We are always glad to talk to brands, converters and local authorities about what specification-led reprocessing looks like in practice, why flexible plastic packaging recycling stands or falls on its end markets, and what it takes to make recycled polymer a material you can build a product around.
Jonathan Attwood is Technical and Quality Manager at IPL Brightgreen.
