As policy, economics and public scrutiny redefine what “good” packaging looks like, converters everywhere are facing mounting pressure to design formats that perform across their entire lifecycles. From Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and recyclability assessment methodologies to the drive for higher recycled content, what happens to packaging at the end of its life has never been more important. 

Beneath the headlines about sustainability, deeper structural questions are coming to the fore. How far should design standardization go, and where should design freedom remain? What does meaningful innovation look like in a world of tightening constraints and where “novelty for novelty’s sake” can cause real headaches for recyclers and reprocessors? And as AI, data, and tagging technologies mature, will brands actually act on the granular feedback becoming available?

At Packaging Innovations & Empack 2026, Amy Hooper, head of Innovation & Sustainability, Biffa, will challenge visitors to see waste managers not just as a disposal destination, but as essential partners in designing the next generation of recyclable, resource-efficient packs.

Bringing end of life forward

For Hooper, the most important message about designing packaging for circularity is clear. “Whether it’s startups or the government or NGOs, we really would like people to be thinking about the end of life at the start of life,” she says.

From the moment a pack is conceived, designers and decision-makers should ask what will happen once in the recycling system. How will it be collected, sorted, and treated once it leaves the consumer’s hands? As incoming legislation unfolds. This will move beyond being an environmental imperative but also become a financial necessity.

That mindset shift goes hand-in-hand with a reframing of the sector itself. Brands need to stop seeing operators as the distant end of the pipe and see them as resource partners. “Seeing the waste management industry more as resource management” is, in her view, essential. This is true if brands are to move beyond assumptions about recyclability and test their packs against real-world constraints.

Why the shift matters

That shift matters because of the different perspectives between the people who make the packaging and those who deal with it after use. As Hooper says, “We might see a piece of packaging enter the market and just think ‘oh my gosh, why have they put that on the market? That’s going to be impossible to recycle.’ But there are lots of reasons for the design of packaging that goes well beyond our expertise – and vice versa.”

Closing that understanding gap requires upstream teams and downstream operators to collaborate. They must sit around the same table, interrogate trade-offs, and work together on solutions rather than working in isolation.

Hooper acknowledges that good intentions for packaging must meet innovation to move forward. “You put something out there with the best of intentions and then you start to see how the market responds. All of these things need to be tested out and just continually refined. Experimentation and flexibility to enable continual refinement is the name of the game with innovation,” says Hooper.

AI, tagging, and tightening feedback loops

​The panel Hooper will join will explore emerging tools that link the design studio with the sorting line. From AI to other tagging technologies, the goal is to give brands upstream visibility of what happens to their packaging in real facilities so they can make any changes they need to.

She points to companies like Polytag and Greyparrot’s Deepnest as examples of this new intelligence layer. “Both are trying to make sure that stakeholders upstream in the value chain have visibility of what’s happening with their packaging at the end of the stream, so they have data to make informed decisions about packaging design through a better understanding of downstream behavior and impacts” – a shift enabled by AI systems that can analyze billions of waste items to track sortability, recovery, and loss. For Hooper, the key question is no longer whether data can be generated, but whether it will be acted on if it is provided?

Policy changes

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of sweeping policy change. From a waste-sector perspective, Hooper likens the implementation of the Resources and Waste Strategy to an incoming wave. A rapid succession of measures – EPR – have been introduced, all of which are increasing the pressure on the packaging industry 

“We’ve got EPR that has come through, and the development of the Recyclability Assessment Methodology (RAM), which is essentially giving RAG (red, amber, or green) status to packaging indicating level of recyclability and environmental impact,” she explains. “People are empowered to refer to the RAM to decide whether or not something is red or yellow or green and use that to inform areas where design changes may be needed,” but, as Hooper notes, “there are just so many formats and applications with packaging that it can be difficult to create a simplified, all-encompassing outline of the pathway for every single type of packaging.” 

Reshaping behavior

In her day‑to‑day role, Hooper is already seeing how EPR is reshaping behavior. “EPR has got things moving, right? People suddenly have a financial cost attached to what they’re going to do. And they’re starting to really see that and go, ‘How do we do this?’” she says.

Startups are more routinely coming to Biffa asking, “How can I make sure it runs through your facility? Can I have your certification or validation that it can be sorted?”

And retailers are also starting to push for suppliers to talk to waste managers.​ But progress is uneven. “In certain cases, companies cannot see a feasible route to make the changes necessary and will just lump the cost of whatever EPR means for them because they can take that hit to put their packaging on the market,” she cautions, warning that a difficult economic climate risks softening some sustainability ambitions. That makes robust, aligned policy – and clearer links between recyclability, fees and market access – even more important.​​

Constraint, standardization, and meaningful innovation

When asked whether there is still too much freedom at the design stage, Hooper doesn’t hesitate. “I might be biased because of my position in that value chain where, for me, the simpler things can be, the more material we can recover,” she says, emphasizing that simplicity means more high‑quality recycled feedstock that can flow back to brands, producers, and manufacturers.

“In an ideal world, we would have standardization and it would be enforced, right?” she continues. While brands often worry that standardization dulls differentiation, Hooper points to research showing “you can still really differentiate even within those parameters. It’s about being creative doing so.”

For her, the sweet spot is where “constraints allow you to be much more innovative. But they must be innovative with impact,” backed by routes for genuinely better solutions to challenge and evolve the rules.

​Reuse and who moves first

Hooper sees strong parallels between the current debate on recyclability and the emerging conversation on reuse. Biffa has worked on reuse infrastructure modeling with partners such as GoUnpackaged. They have already highlighted that, under defined conditions, reusable systems have the potential to be technically and commercially viable. This is especially true across retailers, manufacturers, waste managers, and logistics operators.

“The GoUnpackaged work did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of doing the data analysis to say, ‘Here is a business case,’” she explains. But as with recyclability, the gap now is action. “Now we’ve got the question again where we’re going, ‘OK, well, we’ve got the data – now who is going to turn reusable packaging on?’” In her view, 2026 needs to be the year when reuse moves from slide decks to tangible, scalable pilots in the UK market.

Consumers, claims, and simpler recycling

While the industry wrestles with RAM matrices and modulated fees, Hooper believes the next frontier is consumer communication. “The next step, which needs to start this year, is how we communicate with the public about what these changes mean for them so that their behaviors follow as well – so that they’re doing the right thing with packaging,” she says.​

She also wants to crack down on the usage of terminology around biodegradable and compostable. She also identifies claims about recyclability that aren’t genuine. Here, she notes that inconsistent, absent, or misleading claims could undermine trust in recycling in general and confuse householders just as simpler national collection and labeling systems are being introduced.

Looking ahead, Hooper has a clear wish list. “By and large, we want to make sure that recycled content is used more than it is currently and that it’s cheaper than virgin content. Our plastics recycling industry is struggling. And that’s not great for the circular economy, right?” she says. Hooper calls for strong signals in the UK’s forthcoming Circular Economy Growth strategy.​​