OPINION: The last 12 months have seen major changes in how businesses manage waste. New legislation, Simpler Recycling now applies to companies with 10 or more full-time equivalent (FTE) employees, requiring food waste and mixed recycling to be segregated and collected separately from general waste.
The sector has scaled rapidly since Simpler Recycling went live from 31 March 2025, creating heavy demand on containers and trucks. Further scaling is needed to mobilise for local authorities in April 2026, when Simpler Recycling will apply to Households and around half of local authorities in England will roll out food waste collections for the first time.
Micro-business (those companies with less than 10 employees) will be subject to the same regulations in 2027, and we are already working with customers to prepare ahead of time. Today, 26% of the sites we service in England use only a general waste collection service with Biffa, with only 25% of sites taking food waste collection. While some may use other providers for those services, it’s not something we see on the ground. The consensus across the waste sector is that there is a widespread compliancy issue.
If Simpler Recycling, working within an established system, has been challenging – then urgent alignment and planning is needed for the more complex reforms ahead, including the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS), plastic film collection through Simpler Recycling and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). As a sector, working with regulators, we must be realistic about the pressures on operations and the supply chain.
What challenges have we faced delivering Simpler Recycling?
Delivering Simpler Recycling has exposed the limits of late customer engagement. Communications could not begin until exemption details were confirmed in November, leaving little time to act. Distinguishing between business with more than 10 employees and those with less than 10 employees was difficult, as datasets did not include full-time equivalent counts, so outreach went to all customers. Even with proactive comms and webinars, many businesses delayed orders until close to go-live, forcing near-continuous messaging to drive response.
As a consequence, demand landed all at once. Container orders, operating model changes and shifts in collected materials coincided, putting pressure on operators. Suppliers with limited operational flexibility, such as food waste specialists Keenan’s, acquired by Biffa in 2024, were hit particularly hard by the sudden surge in demand.
Supply chain constraints remain a critical challenge. Container lead times have improved from 10 weeks to 3-6 weeks, but new trucks still take between 9–15 months depending on specification. This means that any new trucks needed for Simpler Recycling for households will need to be ordered sometime between January and June 2025. This is not a criticism of the supply chain, who have responded to the demand. Deployment has been rapid, with nearly 115,000 containers rolled out in the last six months.
Simpler Recycling is demonstrating the huge opportunity inherent within the reforms to the waste sector. Year on year there has been a net growth of 32% in food waste volumes we have collected from our customers. This not only had an economic impact throughout the supply chain – it has meant tens of thousands of metric tonnes of organic material that could well have been going into general waste for disposal. This is just Biffa food collections; nationwide the impact will have been far greater. And this is just the beginning. This sector is positioned to be a key driver of economic growth and mitigator of environmental impact in coming years, if we can get the roll-out of the Resources and Waste Strategy right.
There is more change coming in the next 24 months, with DRS, the next phases of Simpler Recycling inclusive of plastic films, and packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (pEPR), all of which precede ETS; potentially the most transformative policy to ever impact our sector.
Here are the three things we must do to ensure these regulations have the intended impact:
Deliver on time
Defra must deliver the reforms as planned and on schedule, with no slippage. The sector and supply chain can respond to the opportunity however we need clear planning and realistic timeframes. The waste sector was consulted by regulators to create the Resources and Waste Strategy, and we all agree this needs to happen, so let’s make it happen.
Recognise interdependencies
The policies in the Resources and Waste Strategy were designed to work together. We cannot plan for individual policies; each component part needs to have the intended consequences to connect with the next phase. For example, pEPR, DRS and Plastic Packaging Tax (PPT) are designed to stimulate demand for recyclable plastics and remove plastics from residual waste before ETS kicks in. If the policies do not have the intended consequence within the timeline, there are risks of rising costs and wasting of valuable resource.
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
Success depends on coordinated collaboration across government and regulators, industry and waste producers. Collaboration will give us to best chance to measure, iterate and improve policies to ensure they deliver on objectives. The responsibility is not solely with the regulator and policies, it’s not all about people and behaviour change, it’s not all about investment – all of these things need to happen.
In this spirit, it was amazing being part of the discussion on the Simpler Recycling panel at ESS Expo – let’s keep connecting on the operational reality and work together to seize the opportunity the shifting regulatory landscape presents.
