Operations & enforcement
What is Simpler Recycling?
Simpler Recycling is the reform standardising which materials must be collected separately for recycling in England, from businesses as well as households, so that arrangements no longer differ by area.
Its purpose is consistency. Collections that differed between neighbouring authorities produced confusion, contamination and material that could not be reprocessed together.
For businesses it means defined streams must be presented separately, which changes bin provision, space requirements and staff behaviour rather than just the collection contract.
Implementation has been phased with different dates for different sizes of organisation, so the question for any given business is which phase it falls into.
What goes wrong in practice
- Arrangements unchanged because the deadline for that organisation's size was assumed to be later.
- Bin provision changed without the internal segregation to support it.
- Contamination rising after a change with nobody feeding that back to staff.