With the UK hosting this year’s COP26 climate conference, environmental stories have been higher up the news agenda than ever before. Awareness of and support for the need to take action at every level is growing and yet the choices facing both consumers and businesses can seem confusing, and there is scepticism and concern over ‘greenwashing’.

The recycling industry isn’t immune to this as packaging trade body INCPEN showed when its recent survey of 2,049 adults found that almost 20% lacked confidence that the recycling collected from their homes was actually recycled. More encouragingly, the survey also found the solution to boosting confidence could be relatively simple, with information about what happens to recycling after it’s collected second only to a good, well designed, reliable service in terms of factors that influence confidence.

This reflects our experience at SUEZ, where in recent years we have increasingly been asked questions like ‘What happens to my recycling?’  ‘Where do plastic bottles collected in my area end up and what do they become?’ and ‘Why can’t everything collected for recycling be recycled?’. We tend to see a flurry of enquiries like these after a prime-time programme about recycling airs, particularly the ones that show examples of waste crime where items put out for recycling in good faith end up being dumped overseas. However, the answers to these questions aren’t always straightforward and there will be some rare occasions when items can’t be recycled, for example if they are contaminated by leftover food.

Keen not to see the hard work and investment put into raising recycling rates undermined, we trialled a campaign designed to address the curiosity about how packaging is recycled and maintain confidence in the system, focussing on plastics as the material with the highest profile and working with a community known for its environmental awareness. Our community and education team, the face of SUEZ, had an important role to play here, incorporating messaging into their day-to-day interactions with school groups and local residents who come to visit our facilities. Pictures can be more effective than words and, in this case, we found that an infographic helped to explain the journey of a discarded plastic bottle or food tray more easily than words alone, with the advantage of being shareable across social media channels. Once established we expanded our work to cover other commonly recycled materials such as paper and cardboard and are rolling it out for other areas.

An added benefit of the campaign is that explaining the onward journey of items put out for recycling helps with the drive to reduce contamination, by encouraging people to see their recycling as a commodity rather than as waste. 

The issue of confidence in recycling can’t just be tackled at the end of a product’s life, people need to have realistic expectations about whether packaging can be recycled, and manufacturers and retailers have a role to play here in how items are labelled and marketed.

Through transparent and clear communications across the value chain we can build and maintain trust in our recycling systems that will help weather the inevitable media storms and ultimately help people to recycle better.