At the end of last month, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs made this announcement: There is to be a simpler more common-sense approach to waste recycling meaning you can recycle the same waste at home or at work, which should hopefully put an end to the confusion around what you can recycle and where!

This should also impact unscrupulous waste carriers and improve the amount people can recycle. It should also make available weekly food recycling for the majority of households in the UK, which should encourage more people to recycle food waste but this doesn’t become available until 2026 and should contribute towards the net zero strategy for zero biodegradable waste going to landfill.

The aim will be to reduce the number of bins a household needs and hopefully drive increased engagement from the public. Some local councils have up to 3 bins and in Havering there is still a black bag and orange bag system. This isn’t going to resolve larger items of waste and the burden will fall heavily on the recycling firms to filter waste that goes into the bins.

Although recycling numbers have grown over the years they have plateaued recently around 42-44%, so it’s still less than half of the households that bother to recycle at all. Residents in the area where we have our offices in Romford still benefit from a weekly collection, but that isn’t the case for many other areas across the UK.

The targets set by this government for waste recycling are 65% by 2035 and the previous target of 50% was missed in 2020.

Finding the right people to work in recycling plants requires an in-depth knowledge of the industry and environment, if you are struggling to fill vacancies, get in touch with our industrial desk and find out how we can help today.