Global Recycling Day tends to focus on what happens at the end of a product’s life. However, this year’s theme, “Don’t Think Waste – Think Opportunity”, instead pushes businesses to consider the entire lifecycle – and how it can be extended at every stage.
As Hugh Scantlebury, CEO and Founder of Aqilla, puts it: “We often think of recycling as something that happens at the end of a product’s life. But in practical terms, it should start much earlier – when organisations decide what they buy, how long they use it and whether it can be reused or repaired before it’s replaced.”
Delivering on that shift depends heavily on the systems businesses use to make, track and manage those decisions. From asset management platforms to supply chain visibility tools, technology plays a central role in enabling more circular approaches – but also introduces new layers of complexity.
In practice, that complexity tends to surface in a handful of recurring challenges – ones that businesses must better understand if they are to make meaningful progress.
Challenge One: Balancing technological innovation with sustainability
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is maintaining sustainability initiatives whilst driving technological innovation. Taran Rai, Corporate Sustainability Manager at Epson UK, recognises that “the rapid expansion of AI and data infrastructure is reshaping industrial priorities with a shift towards mass-consumption. While innovation is essential, it also brings increased demand for energy, water and finite raw materials. Data centres, semiconductor manufacturing and connected devices all rely on resource-intensive systems. If recycling remains a downstream afterthought, we risk compounding these pressures.”
But it is possible to strike a balance, she explains: “Recycling must be viewed as part of a broader circular strategy. A fully circular economy may feel ambitious, but progress often begins with focused, practical steps. Designing products to be smaller and lighter reduces material use from the outset. Considering the end-of-life during R&D helps close material loops. Extending product lifespans through repair, refurbishment and reuse keeps resources in circulation for longer. Incremental measures, scaled over time, can deliver meaningful impact.
“Technological advancement and circular thinking should not compete; they must progress together,” she summarises.
Challenge Two: Fulfilling water demands
Paper, cardboard and plastic are often front of mind when it comes to recycling – but water is also a finite resource that must be sustained, especially in industry.
“Industrial water use represents roughly one fifth of global use, at a time when supply is increasingly under pressure,” explains Paula Reichert, VP Northern Europe at AVEVA. “Around half of the world’s population faces water scarcity during at least part of the year, and long-term declines in terrestrial water storage are compounding the issue. With climate change expected to make the problem even worse, there is an urgent need for businesses to find solutions.”
She explains how recycling is a key strategy for reducing water usage, and encourages the use of “modern treatment technologies, such as membrane bioreactors, to clean water to a level where it can be reused, enabling organisations to recycle the majority of their wash water.” This is especially important in industries, such as food processing, which are heavily reliant on water for their operations, she notes.
“When recycling systems are paired with centralised monitoring and detailed trend analysis, engineers on site can fine-tune their performance and diagnose any problems quickly,” Reichert adds. “This ensures that as mains water usage falls, engineering call outs related to the water treatment will remain low as onsite teams gain confidence and visibility into the systems.”
Challenge Three: Maintenance considered a cost centre
It is not just outputs from production that should be recycled, but the machinery itself. The continued maintenance of equipment extends its lifecycle considerably, and should be included in sustainability strategies. Paraic O’Lochlainn, VP of eMaint at Fluke Corporation, paints the picture: “Consider a piece of rotating equipment that starts to drift out of tolerance. Energy demand rises because the system is working harder than it should. Temperatures increase, vibration worsens, and wear accelerates. Over time, the likelihood of sudden failure rises and when failure does occur, the costs spread quickly. When the same assets are kept within tolerance, however, the pattern looks different. With fewer breakdowns, the plant spends less time recovering and less time generating avoidable waste created by stop-start production.
“Yet many organisations still treat maintenance as a cost line and a service function,” he explains. “When production is under pressure, routine inspection work and condition checks slip. Backlogs then fill with ‘small’ defects that look safe to defer, right up to the point they stop being small. The costs surface later in overtime, expedited parts, lost capacity, and repeat problems that never get properly resolved.”
The solution is predictive and condition-based maintenance, he explains, noting how it “can break that cycle, but only if they are treated as a way of working, not a bolt-on project. The next phase of sustainable manufacturing will be decided less by what companies announce and more by what sites can sustain. If you want energy baselines and early-warning signals to translate into lasting improvement, maintenance can’t sit on the periphery of performance management. It has to be part of how the site runs.”
Challenge Four: Lack of visibility
For large businesses operating globally, one of the biggest drawbacks is the lack of visibility into their environmental footprint. Saskia Van Gendt, Chief Sustainability Officer at Blue Yonder, explains how “many organisations still lack the infrastructure to collect, analyse and report on sustainability data at scale. Logistics and warehousing processes were designed one-directionally, meaning returns processing for recycling or reuse can be complicated. This, coupled with a lack of full supply chain transparency into where materials come from or what happens to them after disposal, means companies are missing opportunities for recovery and resource optimisation.
However, technology can provide this visibility and enable smarter decisions to be made: “AI-powered systems can provide end-to-end visibility across all supply chain tiers, enabling companies to trace materials, assess environmental impact and ensure regulatory compliance,” she explains. “These solutions also reduce the complexity and cost of reverse logistics by identifying network efficiencies, supporting the recovery and reuse of post-consumer and post-industrial materials. Technology is driving significant improvements in the way organisations can approach sustainability, getting us closer to a truly circular economy.”
From waste to value
As this year’s Global Recycling Day theme suggests, the real shift lies in reframing recycling as an ongoing process rather than a final step. For businesses, that means embedding circular thinking into everyday operations – supported by the right technology, visibility and mindset. Those that do will be better placed not only to manage growing resource pressures, but to turn them into a source of long-term resilience and opportunity.
