Opinion: How valuable would a sustained national communications campaign on food waste recycling be? The potential payoff is huge.
If we could – and it’s a big if – move all food waste into anaerobic digestion or composting: Government will make a severe dent in the target to half waste. Councils could achieve recycling rates of 60% or more. Public sector spending on waste disposal would reduce. Residual waste bins would shrink, and more value could be extracted from what remains.
Approximately one third of household waste is food. It is the biggest component of the bin, and therefore the biggest lever for change.
The government’s ambition is not simply to move waste from one place to another, but to design waste out completely. Food waste recycling has a double benefit: when people start separating food waste, they also start noticing it. That awareness nudges behaviour: people shop differently, cook differently, adjust portion sizes – and they throw less food away as a result.
English Council recycling rates could shift from 40% recycling up to 60% or more. The public sector spend on waste disposal would decrease; the money spent on recycling will increase (but by less). The public purse saves money, everyone wastes less food and every single household makes a saving.
Once food waste is removed from the residual bin, the next biggest component becomes much harder to ignore: products designed to be single-use and non-recyclable. They will have nowhere left to hide.
So why isn’t this already happening everywhere?
Food waste recycling is a big culture change and there are two main blockers. The first is residents – their willingness, confidence or capacity to change long-established habits. The second is the collection service itself, and whether crews are supported and incentivised to treat food waste as a priority service. Both groups need sustained support from political, community and industry leaders.
Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations (1962) categorised adopters into five groups based on their willingness to embrace new innovations. We see this categorisation play out with residents’ adoption of food waste recycling. The innovators and early adopters (16%) use the service because it exists, but the early majority (34%) is a harder group to persuade. They want to understand the benefits, see that others are doing it, and feel that the behaviour is becoming normal. Real change does not happen until this group comes on board.
Residents will say that they don’t waste food. But everybody does, whether food waste recycling is offered as a service or not. Waste composition analysis proves it. And that is an uncomfortable realisation to make and a barrier to getting started.
Once people do engage, the service working perfectly is a basic requirement. Collection crews should be incentivised to maximise food waste capture. Bins should be returned clean, upright and with lids closed, exactly where they were collected from. Food waste recycling is a sensitive service. It demands a gold standard. There is little point persuading people to overcome the ‘ick factor’ if they are rewarded with dirty, broken caddies.
This is why a national food waste recycling campaign is a culture change campaign.
It involves storytelling, strategic messaging and leadership alignment. It looks like ordinary people talking about making savings in their weekly food shop, refuse crews talking about food waste recycling as the priority service, operators talking about green gas production, farmers talking about food waste fertilising the soil and caring for the national food system, and politicians, community leaders and industry CEOs backing all of that up.
It’s on all of us to create a national campaign, from the bottom up and to share it far and wide.
Find out more from communication, engagement, and sustainability professionals from across the waste and recycling sector at the Communications Conference on 5 February 2026 at the Cavendish Conference Centre in London.
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