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With the UK waste sector facing growing threats, we gathered experts from Suez UK, IPL Brightgreen and Cheshire West Recycling to chart a path to success in a challenging 2025.
Industry experts Jonathan Caesar, Jody Sherratt and Jonathan Attwood joined us to talk about the hurdles facing recyclers in 2025 — and why technologies like AI waste analytics are now a survival tool for materials recovery facilities (MRFs), plastics recovery facilities (PRFs) and recyclers that want to regain healthy margins.
Our first webinar of the year is an essential watch for recyclers trying to navigate an uncertain regulatory landscape, growing operating costs and changing waste streams.
Keep reading to learn about the challenges our panellists are focusing on, or head straight to our on-demand recording to find out how they plan to overcome them.
The biggest challenges recyclers face in 2025
From policy changes to labour shortages, waste managers are contending with a broad range of headwinds in 2025. To thrive, leaders will need to prioritise the challenges that have the greatest impact on their business.
Those priorities will vary from organisation to organisation, so our Business Development Lead Matthew Steventon began with a simple question for each of the panellists: “what are the biggest challenges waste professionals are facing this year?”
Representing multinational waste organisations, Jonathan Caesar offered his perspective as a Senior Technical Plant Engineer at Suez UK:
“One of the biggest challenges is changing waste composition, driven by collection and packaging reforms. EPR … Simpler Recycling … and DRS are going to change waste stream composition significantly.
There’s also a lack of investment due to policy uncertainty.”– Jonathan Caesar, Senior Technical Plant Engineer at Suez UK
Delays to concrete waste policy — and its eventual impact on revenue — is also at the top of Jonathan Attwood’s mind for IPL Brightgreen, one of the UK’s leading plastic recyclers:
“Over the past few years, we’ve seen sampling requirements grow ... Staffing costs and training are shooting up as a result.
There are a lot of good [policies] in place that will reduce contamination and increase recovery rates, but everything's in limbo for the industry.’’– Jonathan Attwood, Head of Technical and Quality at IPL Brightgreen
For single-facility operations like Cheshire West Recycling, the challenge in 2025 is also about policy hurdles, and overcoming contaminated waste streams with the equipment they already have. This year, Operations Director Jody Sherratt is tackling productivity:
“The big one for me is supply quality. You’re limited by your control of feedstock … which seems to be an area around which councils are quite nervous to engage citizens.
We end up with a massive pile of mixed material, and no idea where it’s come from. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”– Jody Sherratt, Operations Director at Cheshire West Recycling
After establishing the year’s risks, each shared their waste roadmap for 2025 — outlining the strategies and technologies they’re using to recover more value, with less effort.
Navigating 2025 recycling challenges with automation
The outlook for waste organisations in 2025 is daunting, but recycling technology and lean facility management strategies are evolving alongside the challenges that threaten resource recovery.
In less than an hour, the panellists shared:
- How they’re preparing for policies like extended producer responsibility (EPR), a deposit return scheme (DRS), Simpler Recycling and the emissions trading system (ETS) expansion.
- How AI waste analytics is helping them reduce staffing and operational costs without sacrificing material quality.
- Why facilities need to adopt lean manufacturing processes to increase productivity.
- Why automation is essential for organisations that want to remain profitable amid increasing sampling costs.
- Which emerging technologies they believe will transform the wider waste management sector.
- How the regulators, packaging producers, tech developers and recyclers can collaborate to increase recycling rates.
Challenges like regulatory shifts, consumer behaviour, labour shortages and rising energy costs are often out of waste managers’ control. Pioneering waste professionals like Caesar, Attwood and Sherratt are responding to uncertainty by optimising the variables they can control, from data-driven operations to cross-sector collaboration.
To learn what’s on their waste roadmap — and how AI waste analytics could chart a path forward for your own — watch their full conversation here 👇
