Simpler Recycling brings welcome standardisation, but waste is roughly thirty per cent system and seventy per cent behaviour. Real strategy bridges the two, designing for how people actually behave rather than for ideal behaviour.
Today marks an important milestone for waste management in the UK, as Simpler Recycling becomes mandatory for many businesses.
Since I moved to the UK, one thing that always stood out to me was how inconsistent recycling practices could be — sometimes varying street by street depending on the local council. In that sense, Simpler Recycling is a very welcome step. It brings a level of clarity and standardisation that has long been missing.
But it also highlights something I’ve learned over the years — waste is often misunderstood.
It’s easy to think it’s about bins, signage, and collection, i.e., a logistical or infrastructure problem. In reality, waste is closer to a system design and behavioural challenge. Roughly speaking:
30% is system; 70% is behaviour.
1. The system side (30%) is relatively structured
It typically follows a loop:
Design → Contract → Operate → Improve
- Designing bin layouts, waste flows, and storage
- Setting up contracts, collection frequencies, responsibilities
- Operating day-to-day logistics
- Reviewing performance and refining the setup
This is where most plans focus, and where many “strategies” stop.
2. But the harder part is behaviour (70%)
Waste systems rely on people:
- Tenants disposing of waste correctly
- Staff following processes consistently
- Visitors using bins as intended
Yet people are not rational operators. They are busy, distracted, sometimes uninformed, or often simply not motivated by waste.
That’s where perfectly designed systems start to break down.
This is also what makes waste fundamentally different from areas like energy management, where systems are largely maintained by professionals.
3. This is where real waste strategy begins
A real strategy is not about perfect system design, nor about trying to control behaviour completely.
It’s about bridging the gap between the two.
- Designing systems that are intuitive and hard to misuse
- Accepting that contamination and imperfection will happen
- Building in redundancy and flexibility
- Aligning responsibilities, incentives, and communication
- Continuously adapting based on how people actually behave
In other words, not designing for ideal behaviour, but designing for real behaviour.
Waste strategy is not about achieving perfect recycling; it’s about designing systems that still work when people don’t behave perfectly.
Simpler Recycling provides a clearer framework. But whether it succeeds in practice will depend on how well we connect system design with human behaviour.
For me, waste has always been where my sustainability journey started, and it remains one of the most interesting areas to get right.