If you haven't heard of Simpler Recycling yet, you will soon. It's one of the most significant changes to how UK businesses handle waste in years — and for packaging-heavy operations, it has direct practical implications for how you manage your cardboard, paper, and packaging materials day to day.
Here's what it is, what's already in force, what's coming, and what you should be doing now.
What Is Simpler Recycling?
Simpler Recycling is a UK government initiative designed to standardise recycling collections across England. The idea is straightforward: currently, what you can recycle depends heavily on where you are. One council collects cardboard; the next doesn't. One accepts plastic film; another rejects it. The inconsistency has caused confusion for households and businesses alike, and has contributed to lower recycling rates than the infrastructure should theoretically support.
Simpler Recycling sets a consistent minimum standard — a core set of materials that must be collected for recycling from all households and businesses in England.
What's Already in Force for Businesses?
From March 2025, businesses in England with 10 or more employees are legally required to arrange separate recycling collections for the following materials:
- Cardboard and paper
- Plastics
- Glass
- Metals
- Food waste (where applicable)
These must be collected separately from your general waste. You can't mix them into a single bin and hope for the best — each stream needs to be segregated and collected by a waste carrier who will recycle it.
For most businesses operating from premises with regular waste collections, this means checking that your current waste contractor is compliant and that you have the right bins and processes in place. If you've been putting all your packaging waste into a general skip or single waste stream, that's no longer compliant.
What's Coming in 2027?
From March 2027, the requirement extends to all businesses regardless of size — including sole traders and micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees. There's no lower threshold at that point. If you operate a business premises in England and generate packaging waste, you'll need separate recycling collections.
The 2027 extension also brings households fully in line, with consistent kerbside collections of all core materials introduced nationwide.
What Does This Mean for Packaging Specifically?
For most packaging operations, cardboard is the main material in scope. If you're receiving deliveries in corrugated cases, using cardboard boxes for despatch, or generating cardboard offcuts and packaging waste on a production line, all of that needs to be going into a separate cardboard collection — not general waste.
The same applies to paper void fill, paper mailing bags, and paper tape — all of which are recyclable with cardboard and should be in your paper and cardboard stream. Plastic packaging waste — poly mailing bags, bubble wrap, plastic tape, stretch wrap — needs to go into a separate plastics stream.
This is another reason the type of packaging you use matters beyond just the product itself. Mixed material packaging — cardboard boxes sealed with plastic tape and filled with plastic bubble wrap — creates segregation work at the point of disposal. Packaging that's all paper and cardboard goes into one stream cleanly.
Is Your Packaging Helping or Hindering Compliance?
It's worth thinking about your packaging mix in the context of Simpler Recycling. A few questions worth asking:
- Are your current packaging materials going into the right waste streams, or is everything mixed together?
- Do your packing staff know which materials go where?
- Is your packaging contractor collecting segregated streams, or do you need to review your contract?
- Would switching to paper-based packaging simplify your waste segregation?
Switching from plastic void fill to paper void fill, from plastic mailing bags to paper mailing bags, or from plastic tape to paper tape means all your outbound packaging waste goes into a single cardboard and paper stream. Simpler, quicker to sort, and fully compliant.
What Should You Do Now?
If you have 10 or more employees and aren't already segregating your packaging waste, you're already behind the deadline and should act quickly. If you're under that threshold, March 2027 gives you time to plan — but it's worth getting ahead of it rather than scrambling at the last minute.
Start by auditing what packaging waste you generate and what's currently happening to it. Then check with your waste contractor that they're collecting the right streams. And if you want to simplify the whole thing, take a look at our recyclable packaging range — reducing the number of materials in your packaging mix is the easiest way to make Simpler Recycling genuinely simple.
Questions about switching to more sustainable packaging? Get in touch with our team and we'll help you find the right products for your operation.
Simpler Recycling: What It Means for Your Business Packaging