Could you go into recycling today?

Amy Bird is a UK metal recycling business owner and founder of Women in Recycling. She operates across metal recycling, strategy and industry advocacy with a focus on markets, regulation and operations.

Steve and I have spent years building recycling businesses. But recently I’ve been wondering about something that genuinely bothers me. If we were starting again today, could we?

It’s not whether we would work hard enough or have the nerve to take the risks. I know the answer to that. The real question is: would we even get through the door today?

We did not have to deal with compliance departments, environmental managers, finance directors and lawyers. We started like many people in this industry do: small, ambitious, slightly naive and prepared to work ridiculously hard. We learned. We made mistakes. We reinvested. We got better.

A good recycler

I wonder whether that same opportunity still exists today. The strange thing is, I agree with most of the rules that, right now, are making the job harder. I want properly permitted sites. I want good environmental standards, safe yards, fire prevention, traceability and trained people. I want waste criminals driven out of our industry. But how much does it now cost simply to be a good recycler?

When we started out, the people responsible for compliance, sales, buying, credit control, HR and worrying about whether there was enough money in the bank were basically me and Steve.

Every new requirement may be perfectly reasonable in isolation. Businesses, however, do not experience them in isolation. Eventually, we risk creating a minimum viable size for a recycling company. Below it, doing everything properly simply becomes just too expensive.

Which raises a more uncomfortable question. Is consolidation an unintended consequence of regulation, or is an industry containing fewer, larger companies easier to regulate? I am not suggesting there is a secret government plan to eliminate independent recyclers.

A new conversation

But think about it from the regulator’s side. Thousands of independent businesses, varying enormously in size, sophistication and compliance, are difficult and expensive to oversee.

A smaller number of large businesses with compliance departments, digital systems, audited processes and substantial assets? That’s much easier.

Maybe nobody deliberately designed it that way. But if regulation naturally pushes an industry towards consolidation, at what point does that outcome become convenient enough that nobody tries particularly hard to stop it? That is the conversation I think we should be having because there is a cost.

Recycling has always been full of entrepreneurs. Families who built businesses over generations. People who left school with very little. Characters who started with a yard and a lorry and somehow built something extraordinary. It has been one of those rare industries where your starting point did not determine your finishing point. It certainly did not determine mine.

The level of standards

I want recycling to become safer, smarter and more professional. I do not want lower standards.

But progress should not mean pulling the ladder up behind us.

So perhaps the question regulators should ask when introducing the next perfectly reasonable requirement is not simply ‘will this improve compliance?’ It should also be ‘who will still be able to comply?’

Because if the answer becomes ‘only the biggest’, we will certainly have created an industry that is easier to regulate. I’m not convinced we will have created a better one.