As with so many of us, Liz Goodwin, the woman now all but synonymous with WRAP, never intended to get into the waste sector (and in fact didn’t necessarily intend to take up a role with the newly-formed Waste & Resources Action Programme when she first interviewed for a position as Director of Materials Programmes).

What she did intend to do, however, was make a difference. And so when Goodwin, who had studied chemistry at university before completing a PhD in Quantum Theory and Quantum Mechanics, found herself as Environmental Advisor Manager for pharmaceutical giant Zeneca, which was then taken over by agrochemical company Syngenta (a role that entailed being “the company’s conscience”), she decided she wanted something more: “I actually wanted to be able to give something back to society rather more than just doing this job that was helping to make sure that the organisation I worked for stayed legal”, Goodwin tells me. “And so then I saw this advert for WRAP. I’d never heard of WRAP – in fact, WRAP was less than a year old when I joined – and actually I was doing it partly for interview practice, and then I thought, ‘Actually this sounds like quite an interesting job.’”

Fourteen years later, and Goodwin clearly still feels that she’s able to make a difference at the helm of WRAP, after becoming CEO in 2007. Recent years have seen her steer the organisation through a transition to become a registered charity, following the slashing of its budget from Defra by 72 per cent in the seven years running to 2015/16. She explains the thought process that led to the decision (and seems remarkably upbeat about the changes): “If you think about our USP, it is the fact that we’ve got the expertise, and then we occupy this space between business and government and society, which allows us to bring the right people together to collaborate, to come up with solutions, and then we make the action happen on the ground. So it is that slightly strange space that we occupy, so options such as becoming a consultancy just wouldn’t work with that model. If we wanted to protect that model, then we needed to have a different approach, and becoming a charity helped us to still maintain that position. In practical terms, it gives us a number of opportunities, it makes it easier to access charitable funds through trusts and so forth, but also it allows us to explore different ways of working, so explore different sorts of partnerships, quasi joint ventures – to work in different ways from the way in which we have previously worked.”

Flexibility, clearly, has been key, and will continue to be key as budget cuts and material price fluctuations continue to hit the sector. “There is not enough money to do as much as we would like to do”, Goodwin admits, adding: “So we need to find creative ways of either leveraging the funding or getting the message across in a different way.” She cites WRAP’s work on the Love Food Hate Waste campaign as evidence of successful innovation with a tight budget, as, she says, WRAP has been “quite successful in getting others to essentially pay for using the messaging that we’ve created, so the retailers pay to use it and the householders are seeing that messaging as a result”.

Such partnerships are key to WRAP’s success, according to its CEO. Indeed, Goodwin views the organisation as a “catalyst” for change, noting that it “doesn’t actually deliver anything on its own”, but attempts to bring key players together – whether it be businesses, central or local government, or the third sector (which WRAP has, of course, now joined). Goodwin thinks that partnerships will increase in importance throughout the sector, and especially for local authorities, now that there’s no easy money to go about.

A solution to budgetary problems for that particular part of the sector could lie, Goodwin suggests, in ensuring that “contracts have some degree of risk sharing over the longer term because it will smooth out some of that variability” in market prices that we’ve been seeing lately, and the drop in the actual basket value of what local authorities are collecting, with high-value paper taking up less of the general waste stream (and mixed plastics taking up more of it). I point out that this could face opposition by some in the field, because the local authority culture is traditionally risk-averse, but she notes, quite rightly: “I’m sure they do things now that they didn’t do 20 years ago.” She goes on to explain: “There are real economic benefits to local authorities getting it right. The materials that are being collected for recycling have a value – this can be a financially viable option, and if we lose sight of the economic value of those resources, we do so at our peril.”

And it’s not just the local authorities that do some things differently now – the whole sector has, of course, been changing rapidly over the past decade and a half, with recycling “becoming routine”, and shooting up from below 10 per cent to more than 40, for example. Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been what some might call missteps along the way. WRAP, for instance, has been criticised in some quarters for promoting the collection of glass for use in aggregates and, more recently, for advocating the collection of plastic pots, tubs and trays, which some say has led to contamination of (and much lower prices for) plastic bottles. Regarding the former point, Goodwin admits that she doesn’t support it now, but notes: “The solution at a certain time might not be the solution 10 years later because the world has changed… We promoted glass as aggregates partly as a way of having a market for glass. Now, clearly, glass going into aggregates isn’t the greatest use of glass, but it did help to stimulate that whole recycling mindset.”

And as for plastics, Goodwin says that that particular material is causing a lot of worry at the moment. Recent market price fluctuations saw virgin material drop below recycled counterparts, and dairy businesses renege on promises to use recycled content, despite WRAP’s best efforts to persuade them otherwise. “I worry about it a lot”, Goodwin says. “It’s always been important to me that we try to get closed-loop recycling of plastics happening in the UK, partly because it provides jobs in the UK, but also because closed-loop recycling makes sense – if you can make it work technically and financially, it makes sense environmentally as well.” However, she notes that “there are issues right through from the quality of the material that’s being collected to the way in which the material is then traded”, which the sector is trying to tackle.

Asked what steps we can take, given we are in some ways at the mercy of macro economic forces in the form of volatile markets, Goodwin identifies communication as an area in need of improvement, citing WRAP research indicating that, astonishingly, “only one in four of us is actually recycling the right things in the right way all the time”. And while WRAP has recently refreshed Recycle Now in an effort to address this by “raising the level of awareness and then making it easy for people to do the right thing”, Goodwin indicates that a potential “elephant in the room” when it comes to getting people across the country to consistently recycle the right things is standardisation. While she’s quick to allow that councils “will always have different solutions for different circumstances”, she notes that there’s increasing appetite for more consistency.

And while she seems reluctant to be drawn on her own opinion regarding standardisation (and some of the more contentious issues the sector might grapple with in future, like variable charging), Goodwin is clear on what she’d like to see the sector – and WRAP – achieve: “In the UK context, I want the UK to use resources more sustainably. And that means working with businesses to improve their production and think more circular. In terms of us as end users it means reducing waste, and there are a whole range of things – from business models to product design and production, through to how we use products – that go into using resources more sustainably. Within that, we’ve then identified where we think we’ve got the skills, and so that’s food and drink, textiles, electrical, all underpinned by the resource management piece. So, that is our focus.

“We do all need to work together to make this happen”, she concludes. “And I understand that everyone is going through very difficult times, but WRAP wants to help.”