The partner authorities are Darlington, Durham, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Redcar and Cleveland, and Stockton, contracting through a special purpose vehicle. Viridor says the facility will produce up to 49.9 MW of baseload electricity, with Kanadevia Inova appointed as engineering, procurement and construction contractor. Construction is due to begin later this year, with around 50 permanent roles once operational and several hundred jobs during construction. TVERF will be the 13th plant in Viridor's energy from waste fleet.

The Fairphone Gen. 6, which launched last year, incorporates over 50 per cent fair and recycled materials by weight and carries a product carbon footprint of 29 kg CO2e, down from 42 kg for the Fairphone 5. Both the Gen. 6 and the Fairbuds XL are sold as e-waste neutral, with the company collecting an equivalent weight of electronic waste for every product shipped.

The report also records improved working conditions for more than 11,000 people across Fairphone's supply chain. The company says it has paid $1.25 million in cumulative living wage bonuses to 1,650 workers at five supplier factories, including $215,000 in 2025.

The roll-out adds around 300 stores to an existing network of 659 Specsavers sites and laboratories, which collected 72 tonnes of eyewear and packaging for recycling in 2025, up roughly five tonnes year-on-year. MyGroup processes the hard-to-recycle plastics collected through the scheme, which launched in 2022, and turns them into materials including joinery boards and furniture.

Helen Curran, Specsavers' Head of Sustainability for the UK and Ireland, said: "At Specsavers we believe that sustainability must show up in our everyday operations. Investing in customer recycling in every one of our UK stores is exactly that: a practical, tangible step that keeps valuable materials in circulation and makes it genuinely easy for our customers to be part of the solution."

According to SfPE's independently verified figures published in 2025 using the EU's harmonised methodology, 82 per cent of steel packaging placed on the European market was 'really recycled' in 2023, meaning it entered actual recycling operations rather than being only collected. The trade body argues this makes steel the most widely recycled packaging material in Europe.

The report, launched in Brussels at the 'Shaping Europe's Circular Future' event, calls for EPR fees to reflect the actual cost of recycling for each packaging material. SfPE's members include Acciaierie d'Italia, ArcelorMittal, Tata Steel, thyssenkrupp Rasselstein and U.S. Steel Košice.