Government Publishes UK Modern Industrial Strategy 2025 – Brief Summary

On 23 June 2025 the Department for Business & Trade released The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy 2025, a collection consisting of:

•  A 160-page core policy paper;
• Sector plans for Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Energy, Creative Industries, Digital & Tech, and more;
• A Technical Annex and detailed Sector Definitions List.

Headline aims include doubling clean-energy investment to £30 bn a year by 2035 and channelling up to £4.3 bn into advanced manufacturing R&D.

Recycling is mentioned in the support for the shift to low-carbon energy by:

• Promoting resource efficiency, with a new Circular Economy Strategy for England to set out the Government’s approach to encouraging the re-use, repairing, and recycling of materials and products.
• Publishing a technical consultation on a policy framework to grow the market for low-carbon industrial products.
• Incentivising investment into CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage) and Hydrogen, ensuring that there are viable pathways for industries like steel, chemicals, and materials to decarbonise.

Waste management is not treated as a standalone sector, neither is plastic. Plastic is mentioned once in passing, in the Technical Annex, as part of a generic “materials” input category. Within the Advanced Manufacturing and Clean Energy sectors, there’s no mention of polymers, packaging, or reprocessing.

This is likely to mean that no immediate policy changes for UK plastics re-processors can be expected, and any future support is likely to surface indirectly (e.g. via “materials” or “advanced manufacturing”) rather than through a dedicated plastics chapter.

The recycling sector keeps asking to create investable conditions and RECOUP will continue to press for clear, investment-ready signals on plastics collection, recycling infrastructure and recycled content markets.

See here for all policy papers, sector plans and documents.