Circular Online speaks to Diane Crowe, Group Sustainability Director at international circular economy specialists Reconomy, about its annual Sustainability Report and the global environmental landscape.
How have you simplified the circular economy?
Streamlining complex, linear waste streams is critical to boosting material reusability and accelerating the transition to a circular economy. Our Sankey diagram highlights how materials flow through Reconomy, helping us pinpoint where to drive closed-loop solutions and waste elimination.
We support customers to reduce packaging use and increase recycled content. For example, we helped Sanofi create a pioneering recycling scheme for disposable insulin pens, enabling safe collection and high-value material recovery.
With HP, we designed a programme to collect and recycle toner cartridges across seven countries, closing the loop on critical materials. At McDonald’s, we redirected furniture from refurbishments to local charities and communities, avoiding landfill and creating social value.
Additionally, we facilitate synergies between industries to further enhance circularity. Our new CircuLab innovation hub in Bucharest is demonstrative of this approach. CircuLab connects data, expertise and best practices across Reconomy’s brands to accelerate our circular economy goals.
It provides a focal point for sustainability thinking and analytics, maps environmental regulations, supports our customers’ sustainability and commercial objectives, enhances our sustainability reporting, and helps identify new technologies – enabling us to deliver integrated, scalable circular solutions with maximum impact.
You identified a 55% circularity gap within your own operations. What specific measures are being implemented to close this gap, and how will you evaluate their success over time?
Over time, we aim to close the circularity gap and demonstrate this by regularly updating and publishing our Sankey diagram. We will also improve the granularity of our data and develop this for individual customers so that we can set targets and track measurable improvements.
In April, for example, we launched our ‘Close the Gap’ campaign. ‘Close the Gap’ aims to inspire a shift in mindset, driving positive change across multiple industries by making the circular economy accessible, actionable and aspirational.
It aims to show that by keeping their materials in use for longer and making small operational or design changes, this can significantly reduce consumption. This will not only lower businesses carbon emissions, but also unlock material cost savings, improve efficiency, boost profitability and cash flows.
Through this campaign, we hope to build and educate the market, simplifying circularity to enable us to become the default choice for sustainable businesses across the world.
Could you explain how the new CircuLab in Bucharest will drive sustainability research and what kind of breakthroughs you’re aiming to achieve there?
As a focal point for sustainable thinking and analytics across our business, the aim of CircuLab is to identify new technologies and industry synergies, while surfacing and exchanging best practice.
CircuLab will leverage our combined knowledge across Reconomy and apply advanced data analytics to integrate information on waste and resource quality and quantity, regulatory frameworks, create sustainability tools to pinpoint opportunities for improved circularity, and enhance financial data to drive economic sustainability.
We will also connect these insights with regulatory and technology foresight to position Reconomy at the forefront of new circular opportunities, ensuring that we develop future-proof circular solutions and adapt existing ones that may face challenges from emerging technologies and evolving environmental and economic policies.
This is all with a view to improve global circularity, deliver greater value for clients and to position Reconomy as the industry leader in creating circular solutions that enhance operational efficiencies and preserve valuable, natural resources.
You managed 3.7 million tonnes of material in 2024 with 45% going to closed-loop recycling, what challenges do you face in increasing this proportion?
In 2024, we managed 3.7 million tonnes of material, with 45% directed to closed-loop recycling. One key barrier to increasing this proportion is the absence of national minimum waste standards, which are essential to create a level playing field across the industry.
Similarly, while Extended Producer Responsibility and Eco-design regulations are being introduced, delays to implementation and limited scope mean they are not yet delivering the strong incentives needed to drive greater circularity.
There also remains a heavy reliance on traditional linear disposal routes, often due to a lack of infrastructure to support more circular, closed loop recycling methods.
However, we are making progress. For example, through a £15 million investment in Eurokey – one of Reconomy’s specialist recycling brands – we launched the UK’s first supermarket sorting line to support flexible plastics recycling and enable more closed-loop outcomes for retailers.
Circularity is often viewed only as an environmental benefit, but what are some examples you’ve worked on where circularity has contributed to commercial or operational gains?
Circularity is critically important for long-term sustainable human consumption, but in many cases, it also makes clear financial sense.
For example, using circular resources often results in products with a much lower embedded carbon. This can make those products more competitive, such as in situations where an Environmental Product Sheet is required to document the total carbon impact – a key consideration for many procurers.
Lower carbon emissions can also influence consumer behaviour, encouraging a shift away from linear products made from virgin materials and towards circular alternatives. This can drive demand and support market differentiation.
Additionally, access to circular resources can improve supply security by reducing reliance on volatile or finite raw material markets. This helps to eliminate certain supply risks and creates a more predictable and reliable business case for manufacturers and end-users alike.
Reconomy describes North America as ‘traditionally landfill-based’. What are your key strategies for promoting circular models in such fundamentally different regulatory and cultural contexts?
North America has traditionally been a landfill-based market, so our focus is on transferring the knowledge and operating models we’ve developed over many years in the UK to our businesses in that region.
We’re supporting North American customers to meet their growing data reporting and compliance obligations, helping them work further up the waste hierarchy in a cost-efficient way.
As more States introduce environmental legislation, we’re also encouraging investment in recycling services and infrastructure.
By combining our established circular economy expertise with a localised understanding of regulatory and cultural contexts, we’re helping American businesses make the shift from linear to circular models.
What lessons from Uruguay’s Deposit Return Scheme are most transferrable to other emerging markets?
Helping to shape Latin America’s first Deposit Return Scheme in Uruguay has shown us just how important it is to design systems that reflect local realities – not just ‘copy and paste’ pre-existing European models.
In emerging markets, such as Uruguay, the beverage and retail sectors often operate very differently to those in Europe and informal waste collectors form a far more important part of the existing recycling infrastructure. Ignoring these dynamics risks creating a system that simply doesn’t work on the ground.
Moreover, most of these developing countries also face extremely low separate collection rates – typically below 5% – so, while there are major implementation challenges, there is also huge opportunity.
Ultimately, collaboration between industry, government, and consumers is essential. It’s the only way to deliver a scheme that works in the short and long run, and this applies in every market, whether emerging or developed.
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