Andrea Lockerbie breaks down the key policy changes coming in 2026 and how they could redefine the sector.
This year, multiple waste and recycling reforms will either come into effect, further develop, or move closer to reality. So, what does 2026 have in store for the industry?
Simpler Recycling
Simpler Recycling for all households in England, including flats, starts on 31 March 2026, stipulating the separate collection of:
- food (weekly) and garden waste (on request);
- paper and card;
- all other dry recyclable materials (glass, metal, plastic, cartons);
- and residual waste.
“The biggest shift is the requirement for separate food waste collections from households,” says Claire Shrewsbury, director of Insights and Innovation at WRAP. “The panacea would be that everyone from 31 March will have food waste collections – in reality, that is not going to be the case, as some local authorities have exemptions.”
Adam Read, chief sustainability and external affairs officer, Suez, explains: “There is a transition window that is often forgotten about when you say there’s a deadline of 31 March. Some will already be compliant. Others have been able to park the transition to year two or three because of their contract set-up. So, I think you’ll find that local authorities cascade in over two or three years.”
“I think 2026 is the year where it starts to tick, and we’re all going to be watching. This year we’ll be looking at what’s worked where, who has gone live, if there are any problems, and if the public are engaged.”
For areas bringing in food waste collections, it will be an adjustment. “It’s a big shift, culturally, for residents,” explains Emma Beal, circular economy activist, director of All We Have Ltd, and former chief executive of West London Waste Authority (WLWA). “It involves collection contracts, collection infrastructure and processing infrastructure.”
“You will find a drop in waste tonnages as you shift that material out into the food waste recycling service. But the surprising thing is that despite rolling it out to everybody, you will get quite low uptake. People find it a difficult and uncomfortable service, it’s a difficult culture change to manage, but the key is, think of it as a culture change.”
Beal’s advice is to ‘keep pushing’ as people stop using the service, and you need to win them back, so the service needs to be ‘the absolute gold standard’.
She also urges councils to separately collect paper and card and only use an exemption if absolutely needed.
“Separating out the paper and card does make savings, it does make environmental improvements, and it will unlock capacity in the MRFs for sorting. We need that additional capacity for plastic films [to be collected in 2027].”
All households and businesses must have kerbside collections of plastic film packaging and plastic bags by 31 March 2027 as part of Simpler Recycling. This will be a big change for processors, says Read, ‘because the MRFs cannot handle flexible plastics in their current format, with the way they currently operate’.
WRAP will be working on flexible collection guidance for local authorities. Shrewsbury says the introduction of film collections ‘will mean changes to contracts and figuring out where this material is going to go and the impact on gate fees’.
With film, Beal says there are ‘different degrees of faith’ that the promise of infrastructure ‘is realistic’, and believes we need to be honest with the public and tell them if it can’t be recycled. “Government, I think, has got a massive decision to make about mechanical or chemical recycling. The crucial thing is, just make that decision, that will help to get contracts moving,” she explains.
As with the other Simpler Recycling requirements, Read believes that not every council will introduce flexible plastics on day one. And Shrewsbury adds that managing the type of plastic film put on the market is also part of the puzzle: “As part of the UK Plastics Pact, we have been working with retailers and brands to simplify what [types of plastic] are on the market, to make it easier to separate and recycle.”
This year also sees the start of voluntary monitoring for the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), ahead of full implementation in 2028. When this comes in, the price of disposal for plastics will rise significantly, so alternative options are needed.
Extended producer responsibility for packaging (pEPR)
Closely linked with Simpler Recycling is the UK’s pEPR scheme, which came into force in 2025. It makes businesses (‘producers’) pay the costs for their packaging in the household waste stream.
PackUK, which sits in Defra, is the scheme administrator that delivers pEPR on behalf of the four UK nations. It sets the fees for producers, collects these fees, and makes payments to local authorities. By March, PackUK expects to appoint a producer-led, not-for-profit, Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO), to help it deliver pEPR.
As Marcus Gover, non-executive director, independent consultant and chair of CIWM’s policy and innovation forum, explains: “There’s more change, with modulating fees coming in and recyclability assessments. This may be complex, but it should incentivise more environmentally sustainable packaging design with higher fees for more difficult to recycle packaging.”
This year, producers must use the ‘Recyclability Assessment Methodology’ (RAM) to determine if their packaging is ‘red’, ‘amber’ or ‘green’ according to how difficult or easy it is to recycle. For 2026/27, ‘red’ fees are 1.2x the base fee, while ‘green’ material gets a discount. Estimated fees for 2026/27 were published last year, and in June, the fees will be confirmed. Updates to the RAM for 2027 will be published in July.
For local authorities, in January and March 2026, the quarter three and four payments for 2025/26 are paid, and from April 2026, they receive their payments quarterly. Guidance on how payments are calculated can be found here.
Significantly, local authorities will start to be judged against similar ones, on how ‘efficient and effective’ their recycling service is, which could affect their payments and create tensions.
“Are [local authorities] getting the right [pEPR] payments? Are they ‘effective and efficient’? That’s going to be the big phrase in 2026 and 2027,” says Read. “Also, are the authorities getting [the payment] they think they’re due? Is your twice-weekly collection system now deemed ‘too much’ and not essential?”
“You will start to see local authorities, possibly under some pressure to change, or who might politically say, ‘we don’t mind, we’ll only get 50% of the available [pEPR] money, because the service we provide to our customers is more important’.”
Margaret Bates, former head of the UK pEPR scheme administrator, adds: “I think local authorities throughout the UK, with the exception of Wales, are going to be subject to more scrutiny than they’ve ever had before, because producers will see that there is a direct link between how local authorities deliver and how much things cost them.”
Better communication and closer working between the various groups is going to be important, as well as engagement with citizens.
“We’ve got a whole new industry that we’ve never worked with before, which is the producers,” says Beal. “They are very keen to see change, to see money well spent, and be able to justify it to their senior stakeholders, who will be taking the same heat that councillors take, but from customers, rather than an electorate.
“I think instead of just communicating to our residents, we could try to do more communicating to our stakeholders and partners, getting the data and statistics out, giving others comfort, and letting them see that changes are taking place.”
Bates adds: “I think producers are going to have to work better with local authorities. You might be a producer who changes your packaging, for example, your pack is now heavily paper, so it can be recycled as paper. But realistically, is a citizen going to know that it is different? How do we communicate that it is recyclable to the householder?”
“The more that it’s talked about nationally, the more that winning hearts and minds is supported not just in the local area, but by everyone.”
Deposit Return Scheme (DRS)
On 1 October 2027, all parts of the UK are expected to start operating a deposit return scheme (DRS) for drinks containers. A refundable deposit will be added to the price of drinks sold in single-use containers and reclaimed when the empty container is returned to a designated point. Drinks containers covered by the DRS are excluded from pEPR charges.
England, Northern Ireland and Scotland will include single-use drinks containers 150ml-3l made from PET plastic, steel and aluminium, but not glass. In Wales, the DRS will include glass bottles, initially without a deposit. Wales also wants to roll out reuse as part of its DRS in the future.
The introduction of DRS, as well as plastic film collection, will change material flows. “There are lots of moving parts. But being on top of your data and knowing what you are collecting and what will be disappearing because of DRS will be very important. Local authorities need to understand the impact of DRS and what that will do to their costs,” says Shrewsbury.
Jacob Hayler, executive director at the Environmental Services Association (ESA, adds: “When a DRS comes in, it will negatively impact the economics of sorting infrastructure, because MRFs will have high-value materials taken out.”
“At the same time, Simpler Recycling is replacing some of those higher-value materials with lower-value ones, like flexible plastics. So that could have a knock-on impact on the rest of the dry recycling system, and potentially on EPR fees, as those system costs might go up.”
Beal also points out: “DRS is going to take recycling away from councils, and recycling rates will go down, and that’s really going to hurt. If we’re not careful, people will use it to say nobody’s doing anything, and that’s just not true.”
For Read, it will be in 2027 and 2028 when the bigger operational changes come in with DRS and plastic films.
“We’re quite loose in our plans to modify some of our MRFs this year, because we recognise that the worst thing we could do is transition our MRFs too early if the feedstock doesn’t change. We’ll have plans in place, and we’ll be looking at the data. We’ve got to be agile,” he says.
Gover flags the need for new facilities: “We will need a whole new infrastructure of container sorting facilities to support DRS. It is a very tight timescale to get it all in place – with planning, permitting, procurement and construction.”
He also reminds us to look outwards: “We need to make sure we learn from other countries that have more experience than us as we face the inevitable challenges – eg on deposit return where countries like Australia have been running schemes for nearly 50 years.”
Digital Waste Tracking (DWT)
From October 2026, Digital Waste Tracking will become mandatory for all permitted and licensed waste receiving sites. Defra says the system will create ‘a single, UK-wide digital record of waste movements that environmental regulators can monitor in near real-time’.
According to the government’s policy paper, ‘the first element of our waste tracking service will focus on waste receiving sites, inputting data about all waste they receive. This includes waste containing persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Following this phase, we are planning to expand the service to other waste operators’.
A waste receiving site is one ‘required to hold a permit or licence to receive waste’. HWRCs will not need to record household waste received in the waste tracking service. But the government said it will engage with local authorities on the feasibility of recording commercial waste accepted at these sites during the initial phase. More information can be found in the government consultation response.
Currently, the system is being tested with a user group before opening to all waste receivers in the spring. Sophie Walker, CEO and co-founder at Dsposal, explains that waste businesses or councils can now talk to their software developers ‘to make sure that they’re aware of the API, and they know what they need to do to build that integration’.
She urges operators not to approach this as a reporting burden: “Ask: what are we missing in our processes? How could we make this part of how we run the business? Use this as an opportunity to design systems where you’re capturing the data at the most granular level so that you can use that data to make better business decisions.”
Suez is positive about DWT. Read says: “I think it will make the material flows in the UK more transparent for the first time ever, and it will start to give us a lot more confidence in what works and what doesn’t.” But, on a practical level, it will be a big task to roll it out across hundreds of working sites.
WEEE Reforms
As of August 2025, online marketplace operators have had to record the type and weight of household electrical products sold via their platforms by non-UK sellers, so that from January 2026, they start paying their share of costs for the recycling of this material.
This year, separate collection targets will also be imposed for vapes, so that producers pay for their collection and disposal at end of life. Retailers must provide in-store recycling points for used vapes, HWRCs offer collections, and some councils have introduced kerbside collections – all moves that support the wider shift towards producer responsibility and making it easier to recycle.
What does 2026 have in store for the sector?
While change is difficult, it’s worth remembering why the reforms are coming in. As Bates says: “All the reforms are about trying to make us, whether you’re a local authority, household, or business, responsible for waste. And the reason we’re having policies on this is because it’s not happening without them.”
As for the future, the government’s Circular Economy Growth Plan, expected to be published soon, should show what areas to prioritise next.