The waste industry is rightly focused on attracting the next generation, but Wasters Co-Founder Malgosia Rigoli argues that another question deserves equal attention: what are those people being asked to inherit, and are family-run businesses ready to hand themselves over?
There has been a lot of discussion about how the waste industry can attract younger people.
We need to change perceptions. We need to show young people that waste is a modern, technologically interesting industry. We need better career pathways, better training and better ways of communicating what a career in waste can actually look like.
All of that matters. But there is another question that gets much less attention: what are we asking the next generation to inherit?
That question matters particularly for the many smaller, family-run waste businesses where the next generation isn’t being recruited from outside.
They are already there. They have grown up around the business. They know the industry. And some are still deciding whether they want to take it on.
Ask an owner what would happen if they couldn’t be reached for three weeks and the answer can be revealing.
Perhaps there is a permit nobody else knows how to find. A customer arrangement that exists only in someone’s memory. A pricing decision that has never been written down. A process that everyone knows the owner can sort out, but nobody else has ever had to explain.
These things can seem insignificant when the person who knows them is still running the business. They look very different when that person wants to retire.
The business that lives in one person’s head
Every business accumulates knowledge. The question is where it lives. In a large organisation, much of that knowledge is captured in systems, processes and documented responsibilities. In a small family business, it can be much more personal.
The owner knows which customers need a particular approach, which local authority has a particular requirement, which driver knows a particular route and which problem can be solved with a phone call to a particular person.
That knowledge is valuable and it may have taken decades to build; but if it cannot be transferred, it can also become a barrier to succession. The children who have grown up around these businesses see this at close quarters.
They have watched a parent who cannot take a proper holiday because too much depends on them. They have seen how difficult it is to step away from the business because so much of its operation still sits with one person.
It’s easy to say that the next generation needs to be encouraged to come into waste. Perhaps we should also ask what they are seeing when they look at the business they are being asked to inherit.
This is bigger than waste
The waste industry is not alone in facing this problem. Japan has been dealing with a particularly acute succession challenge among its small and medium-sized businesses. A 2024 survey found that 52.1% of companies had no identified successor.
Germany is facing its own wave of business succession as a large generation of SME owners approaches retirement.
The details are different but the underlying question is familiar: what happens to a business when the knowledge that makes it work has accumulated around one generation, but the next generation isn’t automatically there to take it on?
The UK has a useful comparison much closer to home. In England, 40% of farmers were aged 65 or over in 2025, while only 5% were under 35.
Farming, like waste, contains a huge amount of practical knowledge built up over decades. It can sit in relationships, routines and experience rather than in formal systems.
When that knowledge is passed successfully between generations, the transition can be almost invisible. When it isn’t, the business can be surprisingly difficult to hand over.
The waste sector’s family businesses are not the same as farms, but they share an important characteristic: the value of the business can be closely tied to the people who built it.
That means succession is not simply something to think about when an owner decides to retire. It is something a business can either prepare for over many years, or leave until there is a problem.
What digitalisation can change
This is where the industry’s current move towards digitalisation becomes more interesting.
Digital Waste Tracking has arrived because the regulator requires it and, for many smaller operators, it has understandably felt like another administrative task. What we’ve seen in our conversations is that many, if not most, are overlooking a less obvious benefit to the process.
Digitalisation requires businesses to make things explicit. They have to specify what happened to a load, where it went, what information was recorded, which permissions were applied and who was responsible for what.
In doing that, some of the knowledge that previously existed informally starts to become visible and transferable. That matters beyond compliance.
A business that can be understood by someone other than its founder is easier to hand over. It’s easier to manage when the owner is away. It’s easier to bring another person into. And, if the time comes to sell, a buyer can see how the operation actually works.
The software is almost beside the point. What it forces into the open is what matters.
The commercial consequence
There is a financial dimension to this too. The waste sector has been consolidating for years. For an owner without a family successor, selling may be the right decision.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that but there is a difference between choosing to sell and reaching retirement with no realistic alternative.
A business whose processes, customer knowledge and operational decisions are concentrated in one person is difficult to inherit. It can also be harder to understand and transfer.
A business that has taken the time to systemise how it works has more options. It can be passed to the next generation, professionalised, sold or simply continue with less dependence on the person who built it.
That is why succession planning shouldn’t begin when an owner decides they are ready to retire. It starts much earlier, with whether the business itself is capable of operating without them.
The conversation needs to widen
The waste industry absolutely should be thinking about how to attract younger people, but attracting people is only part of the equation.
If we want the next generation to see waste as a modern, worthwhile industry, that also has to be true of the businesses they are being asked to join and, in many cases, inherit.
That doesn’t mean every family business needs to become a corporate organisation, or that decades of experience should be replaced by software, it means making sure that experience can be passed on.
The industry spends a lot of time asking how to persuade the next generation to come in. Perhaps we should spend a little more time asking what happens when they get there.
