Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging

Challenge

The UK faces systemic challenges in household plastic recycling, with only 54% of rigid plastics (e.g., bottles, trays) and a mere 4% of plastic films even collected domestically, let alone recycled.  

Despite public awareness campaigns, inconsistent local authority recycling systems spanning 39 different collection regimes across 391 municipalities create consumer confusion. This fragmentation leads to high contamination rates (4–18%) in recycling streams and inefficiencies in material recovery.  

Compounding the issue, 60% of collected plastics are exported for incineration, recovering just 5% of the material’s value, while contributing to environmental leakage. Existing infrastructure struggles to process mixed plastics, and the lack of standardised polymer use in packaging exacerbates sorting complexities, particularly for multilayered films. 

Solution

‘One Bin to Rule Them All’ was a three-year project funded by a UK Research and Innovation Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Grant on Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging. 

Bringing together material scientists with social science and business models, the project used an interdisciplinary approach to tackle the issue of plastic recycling. 

The initiative proposed a unified, single-stream household plastic collection system to simplify consumer participation and maximise recovery rates and the creation of higher value recyclate. Key pillars include: 

1. Standardisation: Harmonising kerbside collections nationally, including consistent bin colours and accepted materials like PET, HDPE and PP to reduce consumer uncertainty. 

1. Advanced sorting infrastructure: Deploying robust separation techniques at domestic Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) to improve sorting accuracy for mixed plastics while adhering to a materials hierarchy for maximum value retention and potentially banning exporting unsorted plastics.  

1. Policy-driven collaboration: Aligning with the UK’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme and Plastic Packaging Tax (£200/ton levy by 2022) on packaging with less than 30% recycled content, to incentivise recycled content use and fund infrastructure upgrades. 

1. Cross-Sector Business Models: Developing partnerships between retailers, waste processors, and manufacturers to create stable markets for recycled polymers, particularly polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE). 

Impact 

The study projects that simplified collections would boost household participation, while advanced sorting according to the proposed materials hierarchy could significantly increase recyclate purity, enabling high-value applications like food-grade packaging. By retaining plastics domestically, the UK could reduce its reliance on exporting for incineration, lowering carbon emissions and conserving resource value.  

The proposed system aims to create value in plastic packaging waste streams while simplifying recycling for consumers. Successful implementation of “One Bin to Rule Them All” would position the UK as a leader in circular economy innovation, though challenges remain in aligning devolved governments and addressing cross-border policy disparities.  

This systems-level approach demonstrates how harmonising technical, behavioural, and economic factors can close the loop on plastic waste while creating scalable models for other regions.  

 Access the Policy Report here