The Grocer Gold Award for Sustainability Initiative of the Year 2026
As project delivery managers, SUEZ worked alongside Ecosurety, RECOUP and WRAP, as well as packaging producers and local authorities to deliver a pilot across 10 areas collecting flexible plastic packaging such as crisp packets. In three years, over 400 tonnes was collected, the equivalent of over 50 million bread bags!
The data compiled from the collections, sorting, and processing created a blueprint of best practice and provided the information needed to help give surety for future investment in facilities and services across the sector.
In an era of huge change for packaging in the UK, the success of the FlexCollect project wasn’t just in the results, but in the way that multiple stakeholders across multiple industries worked together to test and trial the measures being proposed.
Stuart Hayward-Higham, Chief Technical Development & Innovation Officer for SUEZ in the UK, said: “With the amount of change on the horizon for the full range of materials being put onto the market and then the methods for collecting and reusing or recycling them, collaboration is key. We were really proud to play our part with the Flexcollect trials and it’s great to see this kind of project recognised by a leading retail magazine for its positive environmental impact on the food and beverage sector.”
“During the FlexCollect project our team saw firsthand the public’s enthusiasm for recycling flexible plastics but we also saw the lack of homegrown reprocessing infrastructure to meet the full demand. With many businesses still yet to fully embrace the first phase of Simpler Recycling and business collections falling outside the EPR regime, delaying the roll out of mandatory collections of flexible plastics for businesses makes good sense, allowing time for the UK to develop the necessary reprocessing infrastructure."
“However, any impact to the growing momentum we have seen behind household collections of flexibles and planned investments in that remaining missing infrastructure, risks undermining confidence in the UK market and the pace of infrastructure development. We hope that authorities rolling out collections from now can continue to do so with the full support of EPR payments as significant recycling capacity is in place or is in development."
“With flexible plastics representing a major source of fossil carbon in our residual waste, this delay must also be considered when deciding the timeline for the expansion of the Emissions Trading Scheme to include energy-from-waste.”