Principal Consultant Victoria Crawford explores how recent changes from England’s Simpler Recycling rules could impact requirements for councils to collect dry recyclables separately.
Under England’s ‘Simpler Recycling’ rules, are councils obliged to separate paper and card from other dry recyclables? The answer may come down to the carbon factors that are applied to the recycling they collect.
On the face of it, changes introduced by S57 of the Environment Act, brought in November 2021, require all dry recyclables to be collected separately from one another, unless a test is met. The test is described slightly differently in the regulations compared to guidance, but in the language of the latter, separate collection isn’t required where it:
- is not ‘technically practicable’
- is not ‘economically practicable’
- has ‘no significant environmental benefit’
This is very similar to the previous version of the test, which also made separate collections the default. However, regulations designed to shift society towards a circular economy are constantly evolving and there is a new requirement that a collector that wishes to mix materials together must prepare a written assessment in a prescribed format to explain why one or more of the elements of the test justifies this decision. This requirement took effect for non-domestic waste from April 2025 and applies to household waste from April 2026.
A softer approach
The Simpler Recycling rules, which came into force March 2025, have softened the requirement to separate materials. The government has decided to allow the collection of most dry recyclables as a single stream. An assessment is only required if paper and card are to be mixed with other dry materials.
So, could the new test, unlike the old one, result in a council having to collect material separately even if it prefers not to?
Assessing practicality
Some aspects of how the assessment should be carried out are uncontroversial. If the material is being separately collected in a similar circumstance to councils, then it is likely to be considered technically practicable. There are examples of authorities collecting paper and card separately from other recyclables in councils up and down the country, from the most urban to the most rural, so it would be difficult for many councils to argue that it isn’t technically practicable for them.
The economic practicability test requires a bit more work but seems conceptually straightforward. If the net costs of collecting material separately are not significantly higher than collecting them as a mixed stream, then it is likely to be economically practicable. There can be some scope issues (e.g. if source separating paper and card affects how you collect other materials, such as food waste, should you also take these wider costs into consideration?) but these can be resolved pragmatically.
What now makes the economic test rather trickier for councils is the potential for a change of collection system to affect the packaging EPR payment they receive for each tonne of recycling. Maybe it isn’t intended that EPR payments should be considered in the calculation – but it seems as though EPR payments would be a relevant economic consideration. However, Defra has not shared enough information about the breakdown of payments to enable a council to understand how a change of system would affect the payments they receive, and therefore which collection method would be cheaper overall.
Environmental impact considerations
The biggest difficulty arises in assessing whether separate collection has a significant environmental benefit. When applying the previous version of the test, the general consensus was that you should, as a minimum, consider the impact on recycling rate and carbon emissions. However, the best available research suggests that, so long as you exclude contamination, recycling collection system has little bearing on recycling rate (residual waste capacity and demographic factors are more important), so recycling rate is unlikely to be a differentiator.
What about emissions? Generally, emissions from collection, haulage and sorting are greatly outweighed by the carbon benefits of recycling. If there is going to be a significant difference in environmental outcome, it would have to be because materials that are source separated yield more carbon benefit. However, most sets of factors provide only a single value for each type of material – WRAP’s newly updated Carbon Waste and Resources Metric is a rare case where different factors are offered for separately collected and co-mingled material and open vs closed loop recycling.
However, there is no guidance regarding what carbon factors to use. Unless a council chooses to use factors that differentiate based on collection method, the analysis will find similar recycling rates and similar carbon performance and so can’t show a significant environmental benefit from source separation.
Stuck in a loop
Perhaps the Government’s planned statutory guidance on Simpler Recycling will stipulate how environmental impacts should be measured, but that is of little help to authorities that are making strategic decisions now about how they will comply with the requirements by March 2026.
Until further guidance is provided, it appears that any authority that wishes to collect co-mingled dry recyclables can justify this choice on the grounds that separate collection will not yield significant environmental benefit – regardless of technical practicability or cost. It simply has to select carbon factors that do not differentiate between separately collected and co-mingled material.
