Reconomy launches refreshed sustainability strategy, Action: 2030, and reports meaningful progress in 2025

Reconomy, the leading international circular economy specialist, has today published its 2025 Annual Sustainability Report outlining meaningful progress against its sustainability targets and updated sustainability strategy, Action: 2030. The report is available for download.

Susty report 5050

Updated sustainability strategy: Action: 2030

In 2025, Reconomy reviewed its sustainability goals in line with its double materiality assessment and refreshed its sustainability strategy to ensure continued alignment with its business priorities. The five-year strategy, known as Action: 2030, is centred around five strategic focus areas:

  1. Enabling circularity
  2. Taking climate action
  3. Empowering people
  4. Responsible procurement
  5. Ethical business
Download the report

2025 sustainability highlights

Reconomy’s purpose is to accelerate the circular economy, close the circularity gap, and help customers understand and improve the circularity of their operations, using data and practical solutions. Across its five strategic focus areas, Reconomy’s key achievements for 2025 include the following:

1. Enabling circularity – monitoring and measuring progress towards the circular economy

  • Reconomy’s current circularity gap has been calculated at 70%1, compared with the 2025 global circularity gap of 93.1%
  • Managed almost 8.5 million tonnes of customer material (2024: 6.5 million tonnes), reusing or recycling more than 6.8 million tonnes.1
  • Shifted Earth Overshoot Day by 15 minutes (2024: 12 minutes) – the point each year when humanity’s demand for resources exceeds what the planet can regenerate
  • Progress has been underpinned by £30 million of technology investment over three years, enabling the expansion of Reconomy’s RecoTek technology centre in Bucharest, the creation of a single platform with unified data for its UK Recycle businesses, and the launch of CircuLab, a new sustainability innovation hub, also based in Bucharest.

2. Taking climate action – further progress made against key targets

Reconomy remains committed to reaching net zero, reducing its impact on and adapting to climate change, and becoming nature positive, with further progress during 2025:

  • 2% absolute (market-based) decrease in combined Scope 1 and 2 emissions vs 2024 (17% reduction vs 2021 baseline)
  • 37% reduction (market-based / gross profit) in combined Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions intensity vs baseline
  • 94.5% of global electricity use from renewable sources
  • 97% of car fleet is EVs or hybrids (58.2% EV / 38.4% hybrid)

3. Empowering people – increased volunteering, training and community investment

Reconomy seeks to provide safe, rewarding and inclusive workplaces while generating social value and, during the year:

  • 22.7% of colleagues volunteered a total of 2,949 hours
  • 0.5% profit (before tax) was committed to community investment
  • 23,072 hours of training was provided to colleagues.

4. Responsible procurement – strengthened sustainable and responsible supply chain oversight

Reconomy is committed to ensuring its operations remain responsible, ethical, and aligned with its principles:

  • 69.6% of supplier spend allocated to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) suppliers
  • 0.2% of preferred suppliers are voluntary, community, and social enterprises (VCSE),
  • 960 operational suppliers assessed during 2,425 supplier site visits.

5. Ethical business – maintained high completion rates for governance and cyber training

Reconomy has maintained strong governance, effective risk management, and transparent reporting, in addition they have provided the following training:

  • 90% of employees completed modern slavery training
  • 96% of employees completed cyber security training

Hear from our leaders

2025 was a year of meaningful progress for Reconomy as we refreshed our sustainability strategy and delivered significant value, cost savings, and circular outcomes for our customers. A major milestone during the year was our significant investment in technology, data, research, and digital capabilities, including the launch of CircuLab, which is transforming our ability to scale circular solutions and provide customers with clearer, data-driven insights into their circularity performance.

This comes at a time when the need for greater circularity, along with the decoupling of businesses growth from the extraction of finite virgin materials, has never been more pressing. By maximising the reuse and recycling of existing materials, businesses can strengthen supply chain resilience, reduce waste and achieve long-term sustainable, profitable growth.

Guy Wakeley, Chief Executive

Reconomy

Hear from our leaders

In 2025, we strengthened the foundations needed to close the circularity gap and worked hard to embed circular thinking, social value, and strong governance into everyday decisions across our business.

While we are proud of the progress made during the year, we remain focused on continuously improving how we create value across our environmental, social, and responsible business areas. Our sustainability strategy, Action: 2030 marks an important next step in this decisive decade for sustainability, enabling us to lead by example and continue driving progress towards a more resilient, resource‑efficient future.

Diane Crowe, Group Sustainability Director

Reconomy

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