For the past 45 years, environmental governance has been shared between the European Union and the UK. This arrangement has delivered significant improvements to UK resource use. But, following Brexit, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) will, for the first time in decades, be solely responsible for setting the UK’s direction of travel on resource policy.

This policy insight looks at how Defra can manage the divergence from existing EU waste and resource governance and create new policies after Brexit.

We recommend that the UK maintains waste policy principles, co-operation on ecodesign standards and access to the REACH regime, alongside introducing new targets to increase resource efficiency, mandatory food waste collections and extended producer responsibility.

This report was produced on behalf of the Circular Economy Task Force, ​a business forum for ambitious thinking on resource efficiency.