New Simpler Recycling legislation: What you need to know as a business owner

The government is working to streamline the process of recycling. National targets are becoming more achievable, with new legislation designed to make it easier for homes and businesses to do their bit for net zero 2050.

Old legislation currently calls for up to seven separate bins to handle recycling, depending on your local authority. This messy situation is being untangled by a policy update called Simpler Recycling in England.

But even if it’s for the better, change is still change. Here’s what you need to know about this new policy, and how your business can adapt as efficiently as possible.

What does Simpler Recycling in England mean for businesses?

From 31 March 2025, businesses with 10 or more full-time employees must separate their waste into three categories:

1. Dry recyclable materials: Plastic, metal, glass, paper, and card. Some waste collectors might require you to subdivide this category. For example, they might also separate paper and card from plastic, metal, or glass.
2. Food waste: Either food leftovers or waste created during food preparation.
3. Residual (black bin/non-recyclable) waste: Things like hygiene products or contaminated waste that can’t be washed.

If your business provides bins for customers, they’ll need a bin for each category. If your business generates garden waste, you need to arrange for it to be recycled alongside food waste or composted.

From a compliance viewpoint, smaller businesses with nine full-time employees or fewer don’t need to conform with Simpler Recycling until 31 March 2027. Part-time employees each count as a fraction of a full-time member of staff, based on how many hours they work. Volunteers don’t count towards this threshold at all. However, there’s a host of business benefits to starting, and demonstrating, your sustainability journey before it is necessary for compliance.

Starting on 1 April 2025, businesses who don’t comply with Simpler Recycling can be reported to the Environment Agency.

How is Green Mark helping business owners comply?

Businesses of all shapes and sizes trust Green Mark for expert assistance on their sustainability journeys. Take our collaboration with the London Borough of Sutton, for example. Throughout the Go Green Scheme, we’ve supported more than 150 small businesses, many of which start without tracking or understanding their waste processes.

Within a year, they’re confidently separating and tracking waste, as well as setting benchmarks to reduce overall waste generation. We’ve found that a big part of the solution lies in implementing sustainable processes as part of companies’ day-to-day operations. At Green Mark we provide customisable tracking templates and help resources to build a system that works with the realities of everyday business.

The sooner these businesses started tracking their waste, the sooner they could demonstrate the results of their sustainable actions, encouraged by achieving accreditation. Making a visible commitment to improving your sustainability wins you large amounts of public goodwill. Tracking waste and putting numbers to the kinds of reductions you make, goes a long way towards proving those environmental credentials.

When we ran the Making Business Greener Scheme alongside Richmond and Wandsworth councils, we reinforced some learnings. A huge range of businesses got involved here; breweries, cinemas, dog groomers, charities, property managers and many more. Each business responded to the scheme differently and identified unique actions to improve their environmental impact.

However, the same message rang true. This was that most organisations didn’t have an understanding about their environmental impact, but they all wanted to make a difference and were excited to get stuck in with sustainability and use the tools that Green Mark, Richmond and Wandsworth councils provided them.

Simpler Recycling aims to standardise the recycling process, but we all know it won’t work the same in practice for everyone. Do remote workers count against the employee threshold, for example? A lot of clarifications are already needed, but persistence with these little details pays off.

Richmond and Wandsworth businesses identified significant carbon saving opportunities in the Making Businesses Greener scheme, and a key piece to the puzzle was by focusing on the same waste management processes covered by Simpler Recycling.

We always work towards providing the most complete advice possible, no matter what business you’re in.

Championing sustainability beyond compliance

There’s been a huge shift in mindset towards sustainable business. Business owners are often more than willing to make positive changes, but they don’t know where to start. That’s the heart of what we do. Those who engaged with our schemes in Sutton, Richmond and Wandsworth are provided with guidance and information on how to ensure they are staying ahead of evolving compliance legislation.

In a sense, that’s one of the biggest rewards to taking a proactive stance on sustainability. Instead of rushing changes at the last minute to stay compliant, you’ve already implemented well-oiled systems and processes.

Green Mark certification has three levels, each covers waste in some way. From simply building understanding about what waste your business produces and helping you develop procurement policies, to helping you continually evaluate and improve your sustainability strategy, we’ll keep you ahead of your obligations.

Robyn Johnson, Green Mark Sustainability Advisor, sums it all up:

“Part of our role at Green Mark is to demystify the steps needed for clients to improve their sustainability and help them overcome any speedbumps. We collaborate their business knowledge with our environmental legislation expertise to achieve compliance to regulations and their sustainability goals swiftly.

“New legislation like Simpler Recycling encourages more organisations to take note of their impact on the environment. Through our proven and trusted approach, we are able to assist businesses in reducing their waste impact with advice adapted to their operations, in addition to full tracking and reporting capability.”

We’d love to get you started on your sustainability journey. Get in touch.