The Facility
To understand what was lost, you need to understand what was built.
Avonmouth was not a sorting facility. It was a full reprocessing plant — the kind that takes dirty plastic bottles and turns them into food-grade material that can hold your next sandwich or bottle of water. According to Viridor's specifications, the facility could process 80,000 tonnes of plastic annually, handling 1.6 billion individual items: bottles, pots, tubs, trays.1 The output was 60,000 tonnes of recycled PET, HDPE, and PP, including 18,000 tonnes of food-grade rPET — the highest-value material, the hardest to produce, the thing everyone says we need more of.1
It was the UK's first co-located plastic reprocessing and energy recovery facility.3 The plastics plant sat next to an Energy from Waste incinerator processing 320,000 tonnes of residual waste, generating enough electricity to power 84,000 homes.1 The recycling facility used some of that power. The system was designed to be self-sustaining.
One hundred and twenty-five people worked there.1
Viridor's CEO, Kevin Bradshaw, said at the opening that "five more reprocessing facilities like Avonmouth could end UK plastic waste exports and generate a third of a billion pounds in new investment."1
They couldn't keep one open for three years.
The Price
While Avonmouth was processing plastic bottles into food-grade material, the UK's regulatory system was sending a different message.
The message was: don't bother.
Under the Packaging Recovery Note system, companies that put packaging on the UK market must buy certificates proving that equivalent material was recycled. But there are two kinds of certificates: PRNs for domestic recycling, and PERNs for export. Viridor told Parliament this structure can make it around 20% cheaper for producers to fund processing abroad than domestically.4 The market heard exactly what this meant: export the waste, don't process it here.
I have written elsewhere about how the PRN system measures paperwork, not outcomes. This is what that looks like from the inside of a GBP 317 million bet. Viridor built the infrastructure. The regulatory system made it optional. Producers could meet their legal obligations by buying export certificates instead of supporting domestic recycling.
And then there was the global market. In 2023, China added a surge of new virgin resin capacity, putting further downward pressure on virgin prices.5 The price gap between virgin and recycled plastic collapsed. Evidence to Parliament noted food-grade rPET could cost about GBP 350 per tonne more than virgin plastic.6 Companies that had been buying recycled content abandoned it. In practice, when the recycled-content price premium is high, some firms may find paying the Plastic Packaging Tax — introduced in April 2022 to incentivise recycled content — cheaper than switching.7
Avonmouth was competing against a regulatory system that made domestic recycling optional, a global market that made virgin plastic cheap, and a tax that was cheaper to pay than to avoid.
The Loss
The numbers arrived before the closure.
According to Companies House filings, Viridor Polymers — the plastics recycling division that operated Avonmouth — posted a loss of GBP 29.3 million in the 2022/23 financial year.8 This followed a GBP 13 million loss the previous year.8 Revenue quadrupled, from GBP 10.1 million to GBP 40.2 million. The losses more than doubled.8
The facility never made money. It was never going to make money under these conditions.
In January 2023, Viridor closed its Skelmersdale plastics reprocessing plant — 40,000 tonnes of annual capacity — to consolidate operations at Avonmouth.9 The stated reason was "increasing performance at the Avonmouth polymers facility."9 They believed in Avonmouth. They bet on Avonmouth. Twenty-three months later, Avonmouth closed too.
The Announcement
On 5 November 2024, Viridor released a statement. I read it three times.
"Viridor's UK mechanical recycling operations have been negatively impacted by persistently and increasingly challenging market conditions, and the absence of planned legislation to increase rates of plastic recycling in the UK."2
The absence of planned legislation.
They named it. They pointed directly at what killed them.
The statement continued: "Policies announced and planned under the previous Government to increase UK recycling... have been repeatedly delayed and have not, to date, been implemented."2
I traced what they meant. The Resources and Waste Strategy was published in December 2018, promising "world-leading" reforms.10 Extended Producer Responsibility — the system that would make producers pay for the true cost of packaging disposal — was supposed to launch in October 2024. In July 2023, DEFRA announced a delay to October 2025, citing "pressure facing consumers and businesses in the current economic context."11 The Deposit Return Scheme was postponed. Simpler Recycling was delayed.
Viridor invested GBP 317 million based on 2018-2020 policy projections. The policies never came.
The 125
I looked for the workers.
The company statement said: "This is a particularly difficult day for our colleagues at Avonmouth."2 It mentioned "exploring redeployment opportunities within the wider Viridor business."2
I searched for union statements. GMB, Unite — the unions that typically represent waste and recycling workers. I found nothing. No press releases. No named representatives.
I searched local news. Bristol Post. Bristol Live. BBC Bristol. The story was covered as an industry event. Trade press wrote about capacity loss and market conditions. No one interviewed a worker. No one got a name.
One hundred and twenty-five people lost their jobs. I looked for their names. I found numbers.
This is what I can tell you about them: they operated advanced sorting, washing, and extrusion machinery. They worked quality control lines producing food-grade material — work that requires training and certification. They handled 1.6 billion plastic items a year. They were skilled manufacturing workers, not minimum-wage sorters.1
I do not know their names. I do not know where they went. The system that generated recycling certificates did not generate any record of them.
The Decommission
By late December 2024, the GBP 317 million recycling plant had been shut down.12 The announcement came weeks before Christmas.
What happens to 80,000 tonnes of annual capacity? It disappears. The building that cost GBP 317 million still stands at Avonmouth, next to the Energy from Waste plant that will keep burning residual waste. But the recycling lines are silent.
The Energy from Waste business is profitable. In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that KKR was exploring a sale valuing Viridor at up to GBP 7 billion including debt.13 The incinerators work. The recycling didn't.
I almost admire the efficiency of the design. The system created a price signal that made domestic recycling unprofitable while keeping incineration viable. It's not that recycling failed. It's that the system was calibrated to prefer burning to recycling.
The Rate
Here is the paradox.
The same year Avonmouth closed, the UK reported its highest plastic packaging recycling rate ever recorded: 52.5% in 2023.14 In 2024, the rate held at approximately 51%.15
The rate went up. The infrastructure went down.
These are not contradictions. They are connected.
The recycling rate measures certificates — PRNs and PERNs — not physical capacity. You can meet your recycling obligations by buying export certificates. You can report a rising rate while your largest domestic facility prepares to close. The metrics were designed to measure compliance, not infrastructure.
The UK met its statutory recycling targets every year. The system worked exactly as designed.
The Question
Viridor named the problem. "Absence of planned legislation."2
They built the infrastructure. They hired the workers. They processed the bottles. They lost GBP 29.3 million in a year. They closed.
If GBP 317 million could not survive 33 months, what will?
Two other major facilities are being built. Veolia is investing GBP 70 million in a plant at Battlefield, Shropshire, scheduled to open in early 2026.7 Enviroo is building a 35,000-tonne facility at Ellesmere Port for 2027.7 But both are single-polymer plants — PET only. Neither has the multi-polymer capability that Avonmouth had. They are not replacements.
The industry keeps warning. The British Plastics Federation's Recycling Roadmap, updated in 2024, notes that "nearly four years after the first edition was published, many key changes required are yet to be witnessed."16 Adam Read of SUEZ UK told reporters that "constant delays are preventing businesses from knowing when and where to invest."7
The warnings were heard. The policies did not come.
I went looking for someone to blame. I wanted a villain — a decision-maker who chose wrong, a regulator who failed to regulate, a company that cut corners.
I found something more interesting.
Viridor did everything right. They invested at scale. They built state-of-the-art infrastructure. They hired skilled workers. They produced food-grade material.
The regulatory system did what it was designed to do: measure certificates, not capacity. DEFRA delayed EPR because of cost-of-living pressures — a defensible choice, by its own logic. China built virgin plastic plants because global markets incentivised it. Producers bought the cheapest compliance pathway available.
Everyone followed the rules. The rules did not require infrastructure.
The gap is not between what someone promised and what they delivered. The gap is between what the system measures and what the system builds. The UK achieved 52.5% plastic packaging recycling while its largest recycling facility prepared to die. The metrics rose. The infrastructure fell.
Now you see what GBP 317 million couldn't survive.