Dr Adam Read MBE, SUEZ Chief External Affairs & Communications Director and CIWM’s ISWA 26 Organising Committee Chair, explains what ISWA 2026 can do for you.
There is only two months to go until the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) brings its annual conference and exhibition to the UK, for the first time in over 30 years, or to set that in context – the first time in my working lifetime!
As a dedicated waste and resource manager, and an advocate for all things circular economy, resource efficiency and net zero, it’s really exciting that London will be hosting the most prestigious of international congresses this year.
The event showcases best practice, pushing the boundaries and challenging delegates to look beyond what they do today and to consider what we could do differently tomorrow – and as such there should be sessions across the three days that appeal to all of us, whatever our role, technical specialism or interest.
I have been fortunate over the years to attend a number of the ISWA events and enjoy the hospitality of wonderful cities like Stavanger, Bilbao, Istanbul and Antwerp.
The technical content has also been the right mix of moving forward at pace and reflecting on what has worked and why, so that countries around the world can look to avoid unnecessary mistakes when implementing new policies, designing new services and building new infrastructure, and this year promises to do the same for both a UK and international audience.
However, being part of the congress, soaking up new solutions, building new contacts and testing new ideas does not define the ISWA annual congress because the host city, its architecture, sites, people and culture are just as important for making each and every event memorable and unique.
I can guarantee as the Chair of the CIWM’s ISWA 26 Organising Committee that the event, and everything that goes with it from the venue at the QEII Centre to the technical sessions, the invited keynote speakers, the study tours and cultural programme, will be memorable whether you are joining us from Bath, Aberdeen, Delhi or Buenos Aires!
However, it is the technical programme that I would like to reflect on here. I have been an active participant in the ISWA Communications Working Group for 20-plus years, and at every congress the group has put on a session dedicated to the issues of communications, engagement, behaviour change and messaging.
I have enjoyed these sessions at previous events, learning about new messaging strategies in the Middle East, the role of AI in community engagement around the world, the need for bottom-up engagement in South Africa, and any number of interesting uses of literature, imagery and language.
This year’s ‘Communication and Social Issues’ session will have a strong core theme about the role of language in delivering effective behaviour change, and I will be presenting a paper specifically about how we need to ‘normalise the circular economy’ in the UK to make it more accessible and easier to engage with by residents and businesses alike.
The circular economy is perhaps not as well understood by those we need to adopt it as by those of us who talk about it every day. Ask my mum about the circular economy, and she will scrunch her nose or raise an eyebrow, but if you ask her about recycling, she will explain in detail the different bins, the segregation needed and the benefits of doing so – why is that?
In the UK, the advance of recycling has taken almost 30 years for most people to recycle most of their target materials most of the time, with recycling rates in the UK peaking in some locations at 70% but on average being nearer 50% of what’s in the bin!
30 years has allowed us time to build effective services, to reinforce the messages (some work with some groups better than others – save the planet, save the municipality money, look after the resources better, or don’t let your community down) and to build evidence and examples of what works and why.
Recycling has become relatively transparent; it is well understood by most people, features on schools’ curricula, and our sites are hosting any number of education visits every week of the year.
So the question is – can we really expect the more recent promotion of the circular economy to really catch hold any quicker than recycling? I fear not, at least in the short term.
What will I share at ISWA 2026?
The work I will share at the session in November draws on extensive reviews of sector reports and commentary, as well as several workshops with the general public to understand how the phrase circular economy is landing and what it means locally.
Even with the attention given by UK Governments to the circular economy in recent years, including the celebrated launch of England’s Circular Economy Task Force and the expected Circular Economy Growth Plan (which has been delayed over recent months), it seems the phrase doesn’t resonate with real people who reacted far more positively to possible ‘actions’ rather than theories – reuse, repair, recycle, refurb, etc.
In the discussions that followed, it became evident that many of the participants are already doing many of the things that we would want to encourage as part of a transition to a circular economy.
For example, repairing old clothes, reusing school uniforms, upcycling furniture, donating unwanted books, buying recycled content items when available, and recycling at the kerbside, but most people didn’t recognise that they were part of the circular economy.
So the lesson learned from this study became evident very quickly: as we roll out a future Circular Economy Growth Plan, we need to change the narrative and use language that will resonate with the target audiences. So let’s start focusing on reuse, repair, refurbishment, recycling, and energy efficiency.
However, we also need to position the new circular economy in the real-world context and again shift the language to make it resonate with politicians, business and wider society.
When the Circular Economy Growth Plan is launched, our advice, supported by real people and their views, is that we talk about local jobs, resource security and one-planet living, which people can get on board with by doing things like reuse, repair, refill, and refurbish.
If government is listening, then the recent delays to the growth plan give us an opportunity to reframe the plan in terms of issues and the language that make sense to society today, such as cost of living and job security.
I hope this has caught your attention and that you might decide to join the workshop in person this November. If you do, you will hear from other experts about how we can make circular economy systems, solutions and services more accessible, more desirable and more aligned to modern living, modern issues and modern concerns.
I am looking forward to hearing the feedback from delegates from around the world about how their messaging is changing, what phrases, images and text are landing best, and designing new campaigns that we can adapt and adopt from nation to nation to help our transition from recycling to circular living not only be deliverable but in a timeframe that wont ned another 30 years of effort.