Uniting industry to recycle flexible plastic packaging

The flexible plastic packaging crisis

An estimated 1.7 million tonnes of flexible plastic packaging is placed on the UK market annually* with little/no recycling infrastructure in place to deal with it.

Policy has mandated kerbside collections of flexible plastic packaging by 2027 in England, with few existing schemes to build on.

Major brands had individual commitments to improve recycling and reduce the impact of their packaging but could not succeed alone.

Packaging producers have long wrestled with ambitious individual recycling commitments for their packaging and an industry-wide change was required.

Something was needed to bring stakeholders together, enabling brands to collaborate with their competitors and the recycling industry to explore how to collect and recycle flexible plastic packaging from the kerbside, in advance of it becoming law.

*Statistic: FlexCollect Project Final Report Executive Summary

Jo Churchill
Former Resources and Waste Minister

The Flexible Plastic Fund and FlexCollect

In 2021 we launched the Flexible Plastic Fund (FPF) with 20 major brands.

With the FPF in 2022 we developed the FlexCollect project to trial kerbside collections of flexible plastic packaging with 10 local authorities and multiple recyclers.

We managed the delivery of FlexCollect and chaired the quarterly Steering Committee, bringing competitors, industry stakeholders and Defra together with the delivery team to provide project direction.

By bringing industry together, we collectively embarked on an ambitious £3.6m project to trial new recycling collections for flexible plastic packaging in real-world conditions - the largest project of its kind in the UK.

The plan was to transparently share the learnings to inform future policy from government, recycling collections by local authorities, recycling infrastructure and packaging placed on the market by producers.

Gareth Callan, Pepsico — Gareth Callan
UK Packaging Sustainability Lead at PepsiCo

UK success with global impact!

A final report and blueprint was released in September 2025, endorsed by government ministers at an event in the House of Commons.

FlexCollect demonstrated that flexible plastic packaging can be recycled in the UK with high recovery rates.

It provided Defra with robust data to accurately inform producer EPR costs from 2026.

It demonstrated successful operational and financial models to collect flexible plastic packaging at kerbside, which attracted worldwide interest.

FlexCollect successfully showcased the power of collaboration between competitors, confirming that flexible plastic packaging can be incorporated into all kerbside collection services with relative ease.

Ecosurety has since advised similar initiatives in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand on collecting flexible plastic packaging from households and how to enable industry-wide collaboration.