What does our waste data mean for Circular Economy action?

The National Waste and Resource Recovery Report 2026 was released this week. The headline is encouraging: waste generation increased, but the amount going to landfill barely changed.

We recycled an additional 74 kg per person compared with the previous year. In other words, the recycling industry is working hard enough to keep landfill volumes broadly stable despite population growth and increasing waste generation.

That is a significant achievement. But it also highlights a problem with how we think about the Circular Economy.

We are still doing most of our circular economy work after something has become waste.

Once a product enters the waste stream, the challenge becomes considerably harder. We have to collect, sort and process it, then find someone who wants the resulting material. We also have to address questions of quality, safety and cost: will someone buy the recycled product, can materials such as recycled PET safely become new food-grade packaging?

These questions matter, and the recycling industry deserves considerable credit for dealing with them. But recycling is only one part of a Circular Economy.

The National Waste and Resource Recovery Report only tells us what happens once materials enter the waste system, not about the materials that never become waste.

Consider the household. Kerbside waste generation has remained relatively stable at around 510–520 kg per person each year for roughly a decade. Recycling has also remained broadly stable, at around 210–220 kg per person.

There are a couple of interesting trends happening at the household level.

For the landfill bin, Councils are rolling out food waste collection nationally. This is often presented as a major increase in household bin capacity, with food waste accounting for around 30–40% of residual waste by weight.

However, removing 30–40% of the weight from a landfill bin does not remove 30–40% of its volume. By volume, the reduction can be closer to 10%.

Food waste collection still delivers important benefits: less organic material going to landfill, lower odour and potentially lower landfill impacts and costs. But for a household dealing with an overflowing bin, the difference will be much less obvious, and probably not deliver on the expectation that most Councils are creating. This could be contributing to the ongoing pushback on these schemes.

APCO and the packaging industry have made substantial progress in reducing packaging weight. That is positive for resource efficiency, but it also means waste tonnage alone may not tell us what is happening to the physical volume of material in household bins.

We could therefore be generating lighter waste without generating less bulky waste.

That could help to explain why household waste collection has become politically significant. When people experience full bins, odour and another week before collection, they experience waste management as a capacity problem - regardless of what the national statistics say.

This creates an interesting challenge for the Circular Economy.

The waste industry wants more recycling, lower contamination, less waste to landfill and better collection systems. Governments can support this through extended producer responsibility and improved collection infrastructure.

These system changes matter. But they only address part of the Circular Economy.

Jan Konietzko's Circularity Deck provides a useful framework, identifying four main circular strategies:

• Narrow — use fewer materials through efficiency, sharing and better utilisation.

• Slow — extend product life through repair, reuse and resale.

• Close — recover materials through recycling and other recovery processes.

• Regenerate — use renewable, non-toxic and regenerative materials and systems.

A fifth strategy, Inform, supports these approaches through better information and data.

The first two are particularly interesting for the waste sector because they can prevent materials entering the waste system at all.

Buying durable clothing rather than replacing fast-fashion items. Repairing appliances rather than replacing them. Designing products so components can be replaced. Reselling products rather than disposing of them.

These activities are often presented as environmental choices — things people should do because they are the "right" thing to do.

What if we talked about circularity in terms of problems people experience every day?

Less stuff in the house. Fewer things to store. Fewer trips to the shops. Products that last longer. Lower household costs. And ultimately, less material going into the bins.

The debate about weekly or fortnightly landfill collections illustrates the point. Whether or not changing collection frequency is the right policy response, the underlying problem is real: people notice when their bins are full, smelly and difficult to manage.

The waste industry can respond by improving collection systems. Recycling will remain essential. Better collection systems and producer responsibility will remain essential.

We also need to make Narrow and Slow practical, affordable and attractive parts of everyday life.

The question is how do we as an industry communicate what we know and our data, while also considering the things we don’t measure?

How do we talk about Reduce and Reuse after spending so long on Recycle?

If you are thinking about where your organisation sits within this shift, our free EPA Alignment Map is a useful place to start. It helps you look at how your environmental obligations, operational controls, responsibilities and evidence fit together, and where there may be gaps as your approach to waste and resource use evolves.

You can access the free Alignment Map here.