Our client Reconomy, an international circular economy specialist and leader in recycling, waste management and compliance, identified a timely opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the current UK waste legislative landscape. For phase one, Reconomy wanted our support to identify the effectiveness of current and planned future legislation in moving beyond the reliance on recycling to increase the recovery of resources at all stages of the waste system and facilitate the transition towards a circular economy.
Entering the second phase of work, we needed to focus on raising awareness of the importance of the waste sector, by evolving the findings to simply demonstrate the value of the guiding principles. We also needed to ensure focused engagement with influential stakeholders to amplify Reconomy’s message.
Sancroft worked with Reconomy to undertake a deep dive into the main resource streams and management methods, considering UK Government strategies such as the Net Zero Strategy and The Environment Act 2021. This involved a comprehensive current and future state assessment of waste regulation in England, other UK nations and the EU. We conducted a series of interviews to test our findings and garner further insight into resource-specific challenges.
Our research identifying high-level opportunities and levers for change was refined into a set of ten guiding principles that could be applied broadly across waste sectors but also specifically to each resource stream and resource management method. To maximise engagement, we further distilled our research into key messages, supplemented with impactful statistics, to quantify the impact of the principles and give weight to the messaging copy.
We then identified key decision makers for current and future waste reform and mapped the stakeholders. The mapping process included the prioritised order for engagement, alongside ‘the ask’, to effectively drive change. The mapping was shared with the team in an action plan, to ensure effective management of the ongoing process by the Reconomy team.
As a result of our work, Reconomy has a clear rationale and robust evidence in support of transformative change to the waste industry and development of the circular economy in an easily digestible and sharable format. The guiding principles and their application prioritise moving resources up the waste hierarchy from disposal to prevention, reduction, reuse and recycle for each of the resource streams and resource management methods, retaining the maximum value of resources embodied in waste.
The evolution of this work distilled complicated policy into simple persuasive messages that can be engaged with across a diverse range of stakeholders to effect changes and raise the profile of industry-wide challenges. The identification of stakeholders and targeted process for engagement, has ensured Reconomy can focus their engagement efforts in a structured way, aligning with key industry moments to ensure responsibility and costs of implementation are fairly allocated across the sector. Our client can now apply the findings to drive progress in the industry.