Across the UK, environmental ambitions are colliding with practical constraints. Waste management businesses face growing regulatory pressure. Water scarcity threatens future development, manufacturers grapple with material and supply pressures, and businesses across sectors must balance sustainability investments against rising costs.
Still, potential solutions are emerging, from circular manufacturing and higher-quality recycling to water reuse, cleaner technologies and AI. The question is how to bridge the biggest gaps and scale viable solutions.
Ahead of the 2026 Environmental Services and Solutions (ESS) Expo, coming to the NEC Birmingham on September 16–17, we asked over a dozen of our confirmed speakers one question: What's the biggest unsolved problem in your sector right now?
Here's what they told us.
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Stuart Allen, Municipal Development Director at Veolia UK: For me, the biggest opportunity in our sector is a whole-systems costs approach, where the costs of collections and material treatment are connected. We know local authorities face huge challenges across the board, but this approach can help them unlock operational, financial and environmental improvements. By procuring flexible contracts that cross administrative boundaries, local authorities can capture these benefits and deliver efficient and effective services for their communities.
Mike Brown, Co-Founder and Director, Rooted Environmental: The biggest unsolved problem in the waste and resources sector is policy complexity, fragmentation and unpredictability. Businesses and local authorities are being asked to navigate a succession of major interventions, from the stop-start approach to [Emissions Trading System] ETS through to transformational reforms, such as packaging [Extended Producer Responsibility] EPR and [Deposit Return Scheme] DRS, all against the backdrop of a strategy vacuum with the delayed Circular Economy Growth Plan. The result is uncertainty, investment risk and a growing number of unintended consequences. Government needs a deeper understanding of how the sector operates in practice, coupled with a clearer long-term strategy and more joined-up policymaking, to create the stable framework needed for investment and innovation.
Adam Herriott, Senior Specialist at WRAP: Good intentions around packaging are plentiful, but joined-up delivery is much harder to find. Packaging can be technically recyclable and still have nowhere viable to go because collection, sorting, reprocessing and end markets have developed at different speeds. Closing that gap will take long-term policy certainty, coordinated investment and a willingness from both government and business to make some difficult choices.
Richard Moakes, Senior Managing Consultant at Ramboll: The biggest unsolved problem is that we still treat too much excavated soil and material as waste rather than a resource. The technical solutions exist, but regulation, inconsistent interpretation and commercial risk often discourage reuse in favour of disposal. To solve it, we need a more proportionate and consistent regulatory framework that gives industry the confidence to keep materials in productive use and supports a truly circular economy.
Emma Mulligan, Senior Consultant at Rooted Environmental: For me, the biggest challenge is closing the gap between policy ambition and what can realistically be delivered on the ground. The waste and resources sector is being asked to help deliver net zero, improve recycling and support a circular economy, but infrastructure, funding and markets don't always keep pace. We need a more joined-up, long-term approach that allows investment decisions to be made with confidence.
Tomas Panek, Head of Contrail Partnerships at Google: I make a point to sleep soundly at night. Tackling aviation's climate footprint requires clear thinking, high energy and relentless execution during waking hours. What energizes our work every day is knowing that actionable solutions already exist. Rather than losing sleep over the magnitude of the climate challenge, our focus is on deploying practical, AI-driven tools like contrail avoidance that airlines can use right now to make an immediate, measurable dent in warming. The biggest unsolved problem in aviation sustainability is bridging the gap between scientific validation and operational adoption at scale. Specifically, integrating non-CO₂ avoidance into routine flight planning and execution without operational friction. To solve this, a critical shift must happen: Flight planning providers and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) need access to tools and data designed to help them navigate air traffic around climate-sensitive atmospheric zones. We are incredibly excited to be building and scaling these tools together with our partners across the industry.
>>DISCOVER: The full ESS Expo 2026 Speaker Agenda
Dimitra Rappou, Executive Director of Sustainable Products at the Confederation of Paper Industries: The biggest challenge is making sure circular economy policy rewards outcomes, not just activity. We still spend too much time debating how much packaging we collect and not enough time focusing on the quality of what we recycle. A tonne of material collected is not the same as a tonne successfully recycled back into a high-quality product. If we want a truly circular economy, policy needs to focus on reducing contamination, preserving material quality and supporting efficient recycling systems that keep valuable materials in circulation for as long as possible.
Philip Raynor, Regional Market Solutions Leader for Water in Europe at Jacobs: Recent and ongoing droughts have highlighted that water availability and supply resilience are becoming critical constraints on growth, while the Climate Change Committee continues to identify water scarcity as a major climate risk. Strategic Resource Options such as reservoirs, transfers, water recycling and desalination will help address future deficits, but most will not come online until the 2030s and 2040s and were not explicitly planned around the Government's New Towns, data centre growth ambitions or the water demands of major infrastructure construction. Addressing this challenge requires more integrated planning across water, housing, energy, transport and environmental sectors to ensure future demand can be met while protecting rivers, aquifers and ecosystems. Adopting a circular economy approach that places a higher value on every drop of water can reduce leakage, improve efficiency, increase reuse, rainwater harvesting and broaden storage and resource options to better balance the needs of people, the economy and the environment.
Dr. Adam Read, Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer at SUEZ: The biggest issue facing the resources and waste sector today is the rise in fires at our facilities and on board our trucks caused by lithium-ion batteries that have been incorrectly disposed of in general waste and recycling. Devices such as vapes powered by these small, embedded batteries have proliferated in recent years, yet consumer awareness of the need to recycle them isn't where it needs to be, and even if it was, it's often not easy or convenient to do the right thing. This needs to change and fast – in the first 6 months of this year, SUEZ experienced 350 fires across our UK operations, with over half of these attributed to a damaged battery. Whilst most are contained in their early stages, they are an ever-present risk to our teams and our infrastructure, and this is unsustainable.
Gareth Rollings, Head of Waste at West Sussex County Council: The biggest unsolved problem in the waste and resources sector is the growing number of fires caused by incorrectly discarded lithium-ion batteries. These incidents put workers, the public and critical infrastructure at risk, and the challenge is growing as batteries become more common in everyday products. We need stronger producer responsibility, clearer public messaging and consideration of approaches such as a deposit return scheme for batteries to encourage safe collection and prevent them entering the waste stream in the first place.
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Jordan Turner, Senior Lecturer, University of the Built Environment: A major problem we currently have when it comes to achieving sustainability in the built environment is striking the perfect balance of social, economic and environmental considerations (or people/planet/profit) when it comes to a business sense. We often seek methods to address one area (which predominantly tends to be the environment), but in doing so, we often sacrifice or neglect social and/or economic sustainability. Whilst difficult, it is not impossible to achieve the three simultaneously, but until this has some real focus and attention placed upon it, sadly, it will always be a re-occurring issue.
Prof. Wayne Visser, PhD, Fellow, University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership: In my forthcoming book ‘Technologies of Hope,’ I analyse 20 clean technologies that could help us reach a net-zero, nature-positive future. The three biggest gaps I see are in the food, materials and technology sectors. In food, plant-based proteins, precision fermentation, cell-cultured protein and regenerative agriculture could massively reduce our negative impacts, but they are being actively resisted by traditional agriculture and the meat lobby. In materials, green steel, green cement, green chemicals and biomaterials could likewise radically cut emissions and pollution, but they are receiving insufficient government and industry support to become cost-competitive. And in technology, early indications are that earth information systems, robotics and AI have vast potential to identify and scale climate and nature solutions. However, we still lack the transparency and reported impact data needed to fairly track the impacts, both negative and positive.
Matt Wheeldon, Director of Infrastructure Development at Wessex Water: Everyone turns to, and applauds, large, grey centralised infrastructure projects as great solutions. Rain (like sunlight) is a decentralised natural resource, landing everywhere on everyone. It is also very heavy, so moving it around long distances and up hills is costly and energy-intensive. Managing it better where it lands, however — via lots of small, decentralised solutions — is more sustainable and climate-change resilient. To do this at scale requires legislation, regulation, and economic incentives to be biased towards the two simple principles of good rainwater management, namely: 1. Rain is a resource which should be captured locally and used where possible; 2. Rain should be returned back to the environment as close as possible to where it first landed. ‘Simples!’ as a certain meerkat might say.
Andy Whyle, Sustainability Consultant, Circular Economy Specialist and Sustainability West Midlands Associate: Sustainability experts worry because the clock is ticking: Demand for critical materials is rising fast while geopolitical dynamics and infrastructure gaps create supply risks. For manufacturers, the imperative is clear — embed circularity — not as an [Environmental, Social and Governance] ESG add‑on, but as a strategic operational priority that protects productivity, reduces costs and carbon, whilst shielding businesses from geopolitical shocks. Do that well, and you turn a source of anxiety into a competitive advantage. Closing the loop on operational manufacturing efficiency and productivity is the sector's biggest unsolved problem. AI is the opportunity — embedded, proven production‑grade AI engineering can turn disciplined process data into automated, real‑time actions that crush scrap and downtime, whilst retaining rapidly disappearing workplace skills. SWM Members are already proving this with industry pilots. For sustainability and business continuity, you need to scale these validated systems fast, or your competitors will seize the productivity and resilience advantage.
Join the Conversation
The challenges facing the UK's environmental sectors rarely have simple solutions. Progress depends on bringing together the people shaping policy, developing new technologies and implementing thoughtful action plans.
That's exactly the mix of expertise you'll find at the 2026 Environmental Services & Solutions Expo (ESS), taking place at The NEC Birmingham on 16–17 September.
This premier event gives you the chance to discover new approaches, get practical insight into your sector's most pressing issues and find ideas you can put into action.
