Key Takeaways:

1. Modulated Fees Are Coming: Packaging will be scored red, amber, or green to influence design and financially reward recyclability.
2. PRO Pilots Underway: Producer Responsibility Organisations are being shaped through real-world testing.
3. EPR = Economic Growth: Implementing EPR could create up to 25,000 new jobs while streamlining recycling systems.
4. Unified UK Governance: A coordinated, four-nation approach ensures consistent rollout and industry collaboration.
5. Policy as Blueprint: This is not theoretical—DEFRA is presenting a clear, actionable framework for circular packaging.
   

Key Takeaways:

1. Collection Model Innovation: A 9-compartment collection system reduces contamination and drives cost savings.
2. Behavioural Campaigns Work: Messaging like “Be Mighty” changed public habits and engaged citizens at scale.
3. Infrastructure Pays Off: Recycling investment has delivered strong environmental and economic returns.
4. Statutory Support Matters: Legislation and consistent national messaging gave local authorities the tools to succeed.
5. Global Example: Wales proves circular economy success is possible with strong leadership and community buy-in.
   

Moderated by: Margaret Bates (DEFRA)

Key Takeaways: 

1. UK-Wide Consistency Needed: Divergent rules across nations are creating unnecessary confusion for brands.
2. Reuse Must Be Standardised: Reuse systems need early integration and long-term incentives to succeed.
3. Design Needs Alignment: Clear definitions of recyclability must sync with EU standards to enable compliance.
4. Mind the Infrastructure Gap: Without major investment, policy shifts like EPR won’t be practical or scalable.
5. Collaboration Is Key: Lasting change demands joint effort from regulators, manufacturers, retailers, and citizens.

Moderated by: Catherine Conway

Key Takeaways:

1. Reuse Creates Jobs: Scaling reuse infrastructure could generate over 13,000 new UK jobs while cutting emissions.
2. Refill & Curbside Lead the Way: These models deliver the best results in terms of scalability and cost-effectiveness.
3. Holistic Modelling Approach: The tool maps everything from supply chains to washing systems, offering full visibility.
4. Stakeholder Alignment Is Essential: Collaboration between retailers, waste operators, and government is non-negotiable.
5. Policy Lag Must Be Addressed: The data is here — now legislation needs to catch up and drive implementation.
   

Key Takeaways:

1. Unified Platform Insights: Tools like Aura’s E Halo track recyclability, carbon footprint, and regulatory alignment in one view.
2. Full Material Transparency Required: Sustainable decisions now depend on understanding inks, adhesives, and coatings — not just formats.
3. Global Regulation Is Fragmented: With varying EPR rules across the EU and U.S., data localisation is critical.
4. From Compliance to Strategy: Packaging data must inform innovation, not just reporting obligations. Partnerships Speed
5. Progress: Collaboration and shared data systems are key to scaling circular packaging practices.

Key Takeaways:

1. Mondelez Driving Results: Cadbury packaging achieved 600 tonnes in plastic savings and 80% recycled content.
2. Müller Making Bold Shifts: £30m+ invested to switch to PP/PET with 30% recycled content for dairy packaging.
3. Diageo Going Smart: New refillable glass formats feature leak detection and integrated digital tech.
4. Commitment Over Headlines: These changes show measurable, long-term investment in real solutions.
5. Cross-Sector Innovation Is Rising: From snacks to spirits, brands are proving that sustainability is a competitive edge.

Key Takeaways:

1. Circularity Demands Unity: Brands, local authorities, and policy-makers must work in tandem to make real change.
2. Funding Bottleneck: Local authorities lack the necessary resources to manage evolving packaging streams.
3. End-of-Life Must Come First: Packaging design should begin with recyclability and disposal in mind.
4. Industrial Emissions Matter: Beyond energy, chemical and material processes need decarbonising efforts.
5. Policy Still Leads the Way: Regulation remains the single most effective tool for driving systemic change.

Moderated by: Stuart Foster

Key Takeaways:

1. Circular = Smart Business: Brands shared how circular models are increasing loyalty and cutting long-term costs.
2. Confusion Around EPR: Unclear guidelines and inconsistent updates are still major pain points for industry players.
3. Embed, Don’t Add: Circularity must be built into systems from the start — not treated as an afterthought. I
4. nnovation Accelerates Progress: Startups and pilot schemes are proving effective for testing circular models.
5. Consumers Need Simple Systems: If the infrastructure isn’t intuitive and accessible, adoption rates will stall.

Moderated by: Rachel Gray

Key Takeaways:

1. Context Shapes Behaviour: Decision-making is deeply influenced by timing, stress, and convenience.
2. Trust Is in the Details: Honest communication about packaging reductions builds brand credibility.
3. Bathrooms Need Rethinking: Home recycling often overlooks non-kitchen areas — a missed opportunity.
4. Loose Produce Needs Better Cues: Shoppers still associate packaging with freshness; in-store education is key.
5. Design for Everyday Life: Systems must align with real human behaviour to create lasting habits.

Hosted by: Waqas Qureshi

Key Takeaways:

1. A Legacy of Sustainability: Wales has prioritised sustainability since 1999, embedding environmental, economic, and social goals into its circular economy policy.
2. World-Leading Recycling: Ranked second globally, Wales' success is built on citizen engagement, political consensus, and clear performance data.
3. Power of Collaboration: Strong relationships with local authorities have driven service improvements through structured feedback loops and working groups.
4. Smart Enforcement Works: Behaviour-focused models in cities like Swansea (letters before penalties) achieved compliance without heavy-handed tactics.
5. The Next Chapter: Wales aims to implement a Deposit Return Scheme and expand reuse initiatives in the next stage of its circular strategy.

Key Takeaways:

1. Balancing Sustainability & Cost: Small brands and suppliers face major challenges balancing margin pressures with sustainable innovation.
2. Watch the Claims: There's growing concern around unverified “plastic-free” and “compostable” claims—transparency is now a must.
3. Smart Design = Better End-of-Life: Designers must prioritise real-world recyclability, not just shelf appeal or material innovation.
4. Tech Meets Circularity: AI is emerging as a design-stage tool to assess recyclability and reduce time-consuming rework.
5. Upskill to Deliver: Teams across marketing, procurement, and supply must be better educated in sustainability to ensure credible, compliant choices.

Moderated by: George Atkinson

Key Takeaways:

1. Clarity Needed on Modulation: The sector urgently needs transparency on EPR modulation to discourage hard-to-recycle materials and reward sustainable formats.
2. Material-Specific Challenges: Glass, paper, plastic, and metal industries each face unique barriers under PRN reforms and infrastructure constraints.
3. Keep Value Onshore: Strong calls were made for boosting domestic reprocessing and keeping valuable materials like aluminium and glass in the UK system.
4. Engage the Public: Clearer communication with consumers is essential to increase confidence and participation in recycling schemes.
5. EPR Stability = Investment: Industry urged for a long-term, unified EPR strategy to drive investment and support circularity at scale.

Interactive Themes & Hosts: These expert-led sessions offered attendees the chance to dive into key challenges in small-group settings. Here's a summary from the Data & Measurement table.

Key Takeaways:

1. Data Needs Detail: Brands increasingly need more detailed insights—especially for recyclability scoring, carbon measurement, and net-zero alignment.
2. Too Many Metrics, Not Enough Standards: Inconsistent KPIs across the industry are holding back progress and making comparisons difficult.
3. Shared Reporting Urgently Needed: There’s a strong appetite for common frameworks and tools that create sector-wide transparency.
4. Data as a Compliance Tool: Accurate measurement is crucial not just for reporting, but also for regulatory readiness.
5. Strategy Starts with Measurement: Without data, long-term sustainability and compliance plans remain reactive rather than strategic.

Key Takeaways

1. Innovation Undervalued: Current regulatory frameworks don’t sufficiently reward early-stage or risk-taking sustainable innovations, leaving innovators under-supported.
2. Brown vs. End-of-Life Debate: There’s ongoing tension between focusing on reducing environmental impact at the origin versus designing for recyclability and circularity at the end-of-life stage.
3. Trialling Difficulties: Many delegates expressed frustration that scaled trials remain prohibitively expensive and are rarely supported through shared or collaborative funding models.
4. Start-Up Friction: Smaller innovators noted difficulty accessing major brands or retailers without validation mechanisms or pilots, slowing market entry and growth.
5. Green Claims Code Not Working: The current guidelines lack clarity and enforcement strength, and fail to resonate with consumers—undermining their effectiveness.
6. Overloaded Labels: On-pack communication is becoming cluttered with confusing claims, icons, and terminology, making it difficult for consumers to understand and trust.
7. Desire for Simplicity: There is broad consensus on the need for a unified, standardised labelling system that is intuitive, accessible, and actionable for all audiences.
8. Trust Deficit: A lack of transparency and consistency in claims is eroding public trust—even for genuinely sustainable solutions.
9. Cross-Functional Disconnect: Sustainability strategy often exists in silos, with poor alignment between departments like procurement, marketing, design, and operations.
10. Competing Priorities: Business goals related to sustainability continue to clash with commercial demands, especially around cost, timelines, and growth targets.
11. Material Substitution Trade-offs: Some brands are making rapid material changes without fully understanding or assessing the lifecycle impacts or unintended consequences.
12. Need for Roadmapping: There’s growing demand for clearer strategic foresight—tools that help brands map regulatory trends, consumer expectations, and innovation priorities over time.
    

Day 2 Welcome & Day 1 Summary

Key Takeaways:

1. Awards as Innovation Drivers: EPA winners shared how the recognition sets the bar for practical, high-impact innovation—pushing the industry toward real-world sustainable packaging solutions.
2. Trust Through Rigour: The panel praised the judging process for its sustainability-specific criteria and expert evaluation, reinforcing the Awards’ role as a credible and meaningful benchmark.
3. Collaboration Is Essential: From internal coordination to cross-industry alliances, panellists agreed that award-winning progress depends on strong partnerships across the packaging value chain.
4. Maximising the Win: Winners encouraged others to strategically showcase their award achievements across marketing channels, customer comms, and digital platforms to build credibility and influence.
5. Feedback Fuels Future Growth: Constructive suggestions, like easing word count limits in applications, show the community’s commitment to evolving the Awards as an inclusive, transparent platform for recognition. Let me know if you'd like this in Word format or paired with visuals for the site. 

1. Accountability at the Core: A producer-led PRO ensures the organisations creating packaging are directly responsible for its environmental impact.
2. Smarter Investment: Karen stressed the importance of investment flowing back into infrastructure to support recycling and reuse systems.
3. Greater Operational Control: Producer leadership enables more agile and effective responses to changing regulatory demands and environmental needs.
4. Tailored to Industry Realities: A PRO model led by producers offers better alignment with supply chain realities and the ability to design workable solutions.
5. Transparency and Trust: The model increases visibility across the value chain, enhancing reporting and building public trust in EPR.

Key Takeaways:

1. Self-Regulation Isn’t Enough: Voluntary efforts are falling short; measurable regulation and accountability are needed to drive real change.
2. Granular Scope 3 Data is Essential: Without deep, accurate emissions data across the supply chain, companies risk greenwashing or misaligned strategies.
3. Cost Modelling Supports Sustainability: Understanding the true cost of packaging choices allows businesses to make more sustainable, long-term decisions.
4. Decarbonisation Must Be Quantified: Packaging must contribute to net zero strategies, and that requires solid, comparable metrics.
5. Transparency Drives Progress: Brands must commit to sharing data openly to enable industry-wide improvements and benchmarking.

Key Takeaways:

1. QR Codes Are the Future of Labelling: GS1’s switch from barcodes to QR codes enables rich, real-time product and sustainability data.
2. Standards Enable Systemic Change: Industry-wide standards are essential for interoperability, consumer clarity, and effective recycling.
3. Supporting EPR & Compliance: Smart labelling aligns with EPR data requirements and simplifies regulatory reporting for brands.
4. Enabling Consumer Empowerment: Digitally connected packaging will help consumers make more informed decisions at shelf and at home.
5. Futureproofing Starts Now: Businesses need to act ahead of the 2027 rollout of 2D barcodes to remain competitive and compliant.
   

Moderated by: Phil Chadwick

Key Takeaways:

1. Fragmentation is the Barrier: Regulatory differences and data silos are stalling packaging progress across supply chains.
2. Designing for Reality: Packaging solutions must reflect logistical and material limitations, not just theoretical best practice.
3. Supplier Collaboration is Key: Greater transparency and shared planning between stakeholders enable scalable, circular solutions.
4. Technology Must Integrate Seamlessly: Data tools need to work across different touchpoints—from factory to retailer to bin.
5. Systems Must Align to Succeed: Alignment of incentives, data, and infrastructure is the only way to move from intent to impact.
   

1. Beyond the Bottle: PET should not be limited to bottles—tray-derived rPET can offer scalable circular solutions if properly supported.
2. New ISO Standard in Focus: A forthcoming ISO definition for “circularity” will help standardise measurement across the packaging sector.
3. Tray-to-Tray Recycling Is Viable: Faerch’s model shows that closed-loop food-grade PET recycling is already technically and commercially feasible.
4. Infrastructure + Policy Are Essential: Circular packaging systems only work when underpinned by strong national collection, processing, and investment frameworks.
5. Behaviour Change Must Align: Consumer understanding of PET tray recyclability is still lacking and must improve to enable closed-loop models.
   

Moderated by: Jude Allan

Key Takeaways:

1. Confusion Is the Enemy: Inconsistent labelling and infrastructure create a fragmented recycling experience that erodes consumer confidence.
2. Consistency Builds Trust: Clear, standardised on-pack messaging is critical for enabling better recycling decisions.
3. Localised Messaging Works: Campaigns should consider regional recycling capabilities to maintain credibility and effectiveness.
4. Empowerment Over Guilt: Changing behaviour is about positive reinforcement—not blame or pressure.
5. Brands Must Lead on Education: Industry has a responsibility to simplify messaging and make it easier for consumers to act sustainably.
   

Key Takeaways:

1. Rethink, Don’t Redesign: Small tweaks in materials and formats can yield significant environmental and cost benefits without major overhauls.
2. Cost and Sustainability Can Align: Real-world examples showed that smarter design can simultaneously reduce waste and improve margins.
3. Functionality Doesn’t Have to Suffer: Packaging can remain robust and functional while being made more sustainable.
4. Collaboration Is Key: Design optimisation requires close coordination between packaging, procurement, and sustainability teams.
5. Design is a Strategic Lever: Packaging design should be seen as a proactive sustainability tool—not just a compliance exercise.

Key Takeaways:

1. Innovation Needs Assessment Evolution: New materials and formats need to be evaluated with updated recyclability tools and methodologies.
2. RAM Alignment Is Critical: Innovative packaging must meet existing Recyclability Assessment Method (RAM) criteria to be credible.
3. No More Assumptions: Legacy testing standards may not fairly evaluate today’s cutting-edge materials—science must keep up.
4. Science + System Compatibility: Environmental gains only occur when innovative materials can be properly sorted and reprocessed.
5. Claims Must Be Validated: Transparency in recyclability claims builds industry trust and prevents greenwashing.
   

Moderated by: Stefan Casey

Key Takeaways:

1. Inks Matter: Decorative elements like inks and coatings can hinder recyclability and must be considered in eco-design strategies.
2. Emerging Materials: Algae-based and biodegradable inks are entering the market, showing promise for lower-impact print solutions.
3. Minimalism = Sustainability: Brands are embracing simplified packaging aesthetics that reduce material use and improve recycling compatibility.
4. Design for Recyclability: Ink and decoration choices should be aligned with recycling stream requirements to avoid contamination.
5. Cross-Supply Chain Collaboration: Printers, designers, and recyclers must work more closely to ensure decoration supports—not blocks—sustainable packaging goals.
   

Hosted by: Waqas Qureshi

Key Takeaways:

1. Cost Pressure is Real: Economic uncertainty continues to challenge packaging decisions, often delaying sustainability investments.
2. Policy Must Catch Up: Regulatory alignment is needed to prevent fragmentation and confusion across UK and global markets.
3. Investment in Innovation is Growing: Despite challenges, many brands are investing in circular materials and digital traceability tools.
4. Customer Demand is Shifting: Clients increasingly expect both sustainability and cost-efficiency—forcing smarter, more agile packaging strategies.
5. Future is Collaborative: Industry leaders stressed the importance of unified action across suppliers, brands, and regulators to maintain momentum.

Hosted by: Martin Kersh

Key Takeaways:

1. £10 Billion Investment Incoming: EPR implementation will drive one of the largest infrastructure shifts the UK waste system has seen in decades.
2. Digital Systems Are Critical: Data accuracy and real-time monitoring will form the backbone of an efficient, accountable EPR system.
3. PRO Rollout On Track: Emma outlined how Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) will be phased in, with extensive stakeholder consultation.
4. From Policy to Action: DEFRA is focused on translating legislation into real-world system change, with clearer roadmaps and guidance in development.
5. Industry Engagement is Essential: Ongoing collaboration between government and industry remains vital to ensure the EPR system delivers measurable impact.