A new briefing paper from the Everyday Flexible Plastic Packaging Recycling Assembly, supported by the Henry Royce Institute, reveals why everyday flexible plastics such as crisp packets, bread bags and food wrappers remain one of the UK’s hardest recycling challenges.
Although flexible plastics make up more than a quarter of consumer plastic packaging, only around 7% is recycled each year. Much of the rest is incinerated, exported, or ends up in landfill.
To explore why this is happening, researchers and practitioners from across the plastics value chain came together at the University of Manchester for the first in a series of assemblies on the topic, led by Dr Torik Holmes, (Hallsworth Research Fellow, The Sustainable Consumption Institute and University of Manchester) and supported by members of the Henry Royce Institute’s Sustainable Materials Innovation Hub (SMI Hub).
The assembly was asked a provocative but urgent question: what would it take to make the UK a world leader in flexible plastic packaging recycling?
What are the issues?
Participants identified four major barriers:
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Not enough UK recycling infrastructure: with concerns that planned household collections of flexible plastics could arrive before the facilities needed to sort and recycle them.
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Packaging that’s difficult to recycle by design: especially multi-layer plastics that existing systems struggle to process.
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Weak end markets: where it’s often cheaper to burn plastic or ship it overseas than recycle it in the UK.
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Poor data: making it hard to track what really happens to plastic packaging once it’s thrown away.
These findings reflect wider policy concerns highlighted in a recent Policy@Manchester blog, “Still trash? UK flexible plastic packaging recycling and infrastructural contraction”, which warns that recycling ambitions risk outpacing real-world capacity.
What needs to change?
The Assembly agreed on three clear priorities:
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Stronger, smarter legislation that supports UK recycling rather than export or incineration.
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Investment in innovation, including new sorting and recycling technologies and food-grade recycled plastics.
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Better end markets, so recycling flexible plastics makes economic and environmental sense.
What’s next?
This first Assembly has set the agenda. A follow-up event will focus on practical solutions and examples of what already works, and how those approaches can be scaled. If you would like to learn more about Dr Torik Holme’s research or get involved in the next assembly, please email: torik.holmes@manchester.ac.uk
Read the full Everyday Flexible Plastic Packaging Recycling Assembly briefing paper
Read the related Policy@Manchester article: Still trash? UK flexible plastic packaging recycling and infrastructural contraction
