20/05/2026
The government’s Simpler Recycling legislation is designed to make life easier for households. For councils, however, it introduces a far more complex reality.
What sounds like a straightforward move towards consistency – asking councils to collect the same materials everywhere – actually comes with significant practical challenges behind the scenes. Collection systems, contracts, processing capacity, and market demand all need to align for recycling to actually work.
For councils, this isn't simply a case of adding another item to the list; it's a fundamental shift in responsibility that requires infrastructure, funding, and end markets that do not, as yet, fully exist.
The reality is that policy, markets, and infrastructure are misaligned.
Take plastic films – such as carrier bags, wrappers, and flexible packaging. Councils will be mandated to collect these from the kerbside by the end of March 2027. Simple enough, you may think - it’s just a case of collecting another item in the bin, isn’t it? In fact, it’s one of the most difficult and misunderstood challenges facing councils under Simpler Recycling.
And this is where Exeter is somewhat ahead of the curve, as I’ll explain further on.
The UK’s Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) system sits at the heart of this challenge, but it's poorly understood outside the sector. PRNs are effectively an evidence scheme: when a tonne of packaging material is recycled, a PRN is issued, and producers must buy enough PRNs to demonstrate they have met their legal recycling obligations. In theory, this should fund recycling by shifting costs from councils to producers; in practice, however, the system is far more volatile.
PRN prices rise and fall sharply depending on market conditions, and the money paid by producers doesn't flow in a consistent or transparent way to local authorities or reprocessors. This creates uncertainty for processors and councils alike – particularly for low-value materials like plastic films, which are harder to process and prone to contamination.
Crucially, a PRN proves that recycling has happened somewhere, but it doesn't guarantee investment in the specific infrastructure needed for difficult materials like plastic films. This means councils can be required to collect more material under new legislation while the financial mechanism intended to support the recycling of that material doesn't reliably deliver the facilities or markets needed to handle it.
In other words, collection can increase without a corresponding increase in viable recycling capacity.
For years, supermarkets have stepped in to fill this gap, providing front-of-store collection points for plastic films and flexible packaging. This has created a partial, retailer-led solution where a lot of different flexible plastic materials can be aggregated and sorted into cleaner streams and sent to the limited specialist reprocessors that exist. Moreover, it's an appropriate system, given that supermarkets sell so much of the material that is so difficult to process.
However, from March 2027 the Simpler Recycling legislation will shift responsibility for film collection away from retailers and onto local authorities – without a matching shift in infrastructure or guaranteed end markets. In effect, councils are being asked to take on a material stream that others have struggled to manage, but without the same level of control over quality, quantity, processing routes, or end markets.
The Simpler Recycling reforms are well intentioned in seeking consistency, but they risk focusing heavily on collection targets without sufficient regard for what happens next. The fundamental problem in mandating collection by councils is that the infrastructure required to actually recycle the material at scale isn't yet in place, and doesn't look like being in place very soon.
To be clear: this is not simply a problem for councils to solve. There needs to be significant, national systemic intervention to bridge the gap between collection and reprocessing, and between reprocessing and recycling.
Common parlance is misleading, because you aren't really ‘recycling’ by placing an item in your recycling bin, only passing it on to be sorted – or processed. Recycling happens when material is reprocessed and then turned into a new product – and that depends entirely on demand. But recycling markets for cheaper materials are strangulated. Plastic films are typically low-value and expensive to process, so there must be a buyer willing to purchase the recycled output in order to make collecting and sorting the original material viable. Without it, material can sit in storage, be exported, downcycled, or ultimately incinerated.
This is where the economics for producers come into sharp focus. Virgin plastic is often significantly cheaper than recycled plastic; as a result, there is little commercial incentive for manufacturers to choose recycled content. This undermines the entire system. If producers are not required to buy recycled material, the market for it remains weak. Many in the sector argue that mandating the use of recycled content – prioritising it over virgin plastic – is essential to create stable demand and make recycling financially viable.
International export rules have further exposed the fragility of the system. As countries have tightened restrictions on plastic waste exports, Europe has been forced to manage more of its own material. In Germany, for example, large volumes of plastics – including material from deposit return schemes – have built up in storage due to limited onwards processing outlets, with some high-profile fires highlighting the risks of stockpiling material without secure end markets.
So how are we in Exeter approaching these challenges?
Well, Exeter shows what’s possible when collection, sorting, and end markets are actively aligned – but our story also underlines how unusual our position is.
Exeter City Council is almost unique in the UK in being able to collect certain plastic films at the kerbside and turn them back into usable products through a genuine closed loop system, working with a UK reprocessor to turn plastic bags into litter sacks used in our own services. Crucially, this is supported by a strong focus on quality across all the materials we sort: plastic materials are carefully separated by polymer type at our own Materials Reclamation Facility, producing high-grade outputs that are more attractive to buyers and more likely to be recycled back into like-for-like products.
However, this connection of tight control, infrastructure, and established end markets is not typical across the UK, and decent access to market is severely limited to those that can achieve the required outputs. We own an MRF, but hardly any other council does. Our approach shows how far national systems need to go to offer every council a comparable solution.
Ultimately, the challenge of recycling plastic films highlights a wider truth: waste policy cannot be solved by collection requirements alone. There is a gap between legislation and infrastructure that is at risk of widening further, and councils are increasingly being asked to bridge it.
Effective recycling depends on a fully aligned system: clear and stable policy, functioning producer responsibility mechanisms, adequate domestic reprocessing capacity, and strong end-market demand. Without these working together, slogans and headlines around increased council collection responsibilities risk oversimplifying the significant difficulties councils face.
Much of the frustration people feel about recycling is often directed at councils, when in reality the biggest levers – product design, material choice, and the systems that fund and manage recycling – sit with producers and national policy, not local authorities trying to make a flawed system work on the ground.
