Global Recycling Day 2025: Duo UK and Emerge pilot LDPE recycling as EPR impacts local businesses

Duo UK and Emerge are piloting a regional recycling scheme in Greater Manchester, UK, for low-density polyethylene (LDPE) materials as the country prepares for the incoming packaging EPR (pEPR). Myerson Solicitors tells us about the potential impacts of the new “polluter-pays” rules on local businesses this Global Recycling Day.

The pEPR scheme is designed to shift the responsibility and cost of packaging waste management from taxpayers and local authorities to businesses that use and supply the packaging. The first EPR payments will be required between October and December this year.

Global Recycling Day was founded in 2018 to recognize, support, and inspire important recycling initiatives. This year, the organization announced a “Recycling Heroes” competition to honor people, places, businesses, and activities that have “championed recycling efforts.” The competition will announce 20 winners from all over the world. Each will receive US$500 and social media coverage about their efforts on Global Recycling Day channels.

Duo UK has partnered with Emerge Recycling to collect and recycle LDPE. The pilot scheme aims to boost recycling rates in Greater Manchester, tackling the UK’s “least recycled plastic.” The pilot also aims to increase awareness in small and medium businesses about recycling systems.

Hard-to-recycle materials 

The pEPR is a national legislation that will affect local and small businesses on a regional level. Some packaging materials are more challenging for companies because they do not typically fit into established recycling systems, such as LDPE. 

The trade body Wrap estimates that nearly 95% of LDPE is not recycled. It is found in everyday items like carrier bags, shrink wrap, bottles, containers, and tubing. The low recycling rates are largely due to contamination from food or drinks, low demand for recycled material, and the difficulty of processing thin plastic films that can clog machinery.

LPDE is found in everyday items like carrier bags, shrink wrap, bottles, containers, and tubing.Zoe Brimelow, director at Duo UK, says: “This partnership aims to use our collective resources, expertise, and passion to strengthen closed-loop recycling in the region by engaging with small, medium, and large companies that generate plastic waste and do not have the facilities or know-how to recycle it.”

“As a business, we use many post-consumer recycled pellets, turning this material into new packaging products. This has increased to over 30% of our total material usage yearly. This campaign with Emerge will enable more valuable waste to be kept in the economy and available to manufacturers like us to create new products, reducing dependency on virgin materials.”

In the scheme, LDPE films are collected from 30 businesses in Greater Manchester by collection company Emerge in the build-up to Global Recycling Day. Duo UK says it then recycles the waste back into consumer products. 

Lucy Danger, CEO at Emerge, adds: “By segregating materials at source, we optimize their inherent value while reducing the negative impact of waste incineration. Waste segregation also gives visibility and data, allowing operations to identify opportunities to achieve behavioral change and minimize unnecessary waste costs.”

“By working with our partners at Duo in this way, our customers will reduce their carbon impact, save money, and contribute toward social value locally.”

New waste management rules 

The UK’s pEPR requires businesses to act environmentally sustainably by making them responsible for products’ end-of-life impact, details Richard Meehan, senior associate at Myerson Solicitors, in an article titled, “Global Recycling Day: No Package Holiday for Producers under EPR.”

The pEPR scheme replaces the 2007 Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations, demanding that businesses take more accountability for their products’ environmental impact. 

It shifts the responsibility of post-consumer waste management from municipalities and governments to producers and aims to prevent waste at the source and promote environmentally sustainable product design.

Meehan explains that the EPR regime has been cast wider and now captures a class of ‘small’ businesses.“The key differences which producers should note under the new EPR regime include additional costs and compliance requirements, particularly for ‘large’ organizations with an annual turnover of £2 million (US$2.6 million) or more, who supply or import more than 50 tons of packaging into the UK,” Meehan tells Packaging Insights. 

“Crucially, the ‘net’ of the new EPR regime has been cast wider and now captures a class of ‘small’ businesses who, due to their size and volume of packaging activity, fell outside the scope of the previous regime (with an annual turnover of £1 million (US$1.3 million) or more, or who supply or import more than 25 tons of packaging into the UK).” 

He adds: “Any branding applied to the packaging is important, since supplying packaged goods under a business’s brand may if the other criteria are fulfilled, mean that the brand owner itself is subject to the EPR regime, whether the brand owner has itself packaged the goods or has outsourced that activity to a third party.” 

Nudging the circular economy

Consumers are increasingly looking for waste solutions that promote a circular economy as legislation and regulatory frameworks target commercial waste produced by businesses.

“The EPR regime aims to incentivize businesses to minimize their packaging usage by making the businesses responsible for the total cost of managing packaging waste, rather than the taxpayer,” explains Meehan. 

“By extending the regime’s scope to cover ‘small’ businesses and increasing the cost and compliance requirements, the intention is to accelerate the achievement of those objectives.”

The pEPR is expected to significantly impact the UK packaging industry. To comply with the new regulations, packaging providers must adopt sustainable materials and improve waste management.

Recently, the scheme administrator for the pEPR, Pack UK, announced itself at Packaging Innovations 2025, describing the regulation as a “game-changer” for the country’s packaging circular economy. However, the British Plastics Federation BPF warned of the likely damaging impacts on plastic packaging businesses.