UK waste strategy relies on recycling targets to drive action. But this report highlights that, once collected, materials are often lost to the economy instead of providing a valuable stream of secondary raw material which could be used by industry.

It outlines the scale of the problem and the opportunity in relation to plastic, steel and critical raw materials. We propose new measures to complement recycling targets which would help to ‘pull’ these materials back into use in manufacturing.

Correction: the printed version of this report contains an error on pages 4 and 9, where it states that increasing the UK’s reprocessing infrastructure could provide 58,000 net jobs. The correct figure should be 54,000 net jobs. This has been corrected in the online version of the report.