NERF Awards: Bringing People Together to Drive Change

The North East Recycling Forum has always been about bringing people from across the waste and resources sector together. We strive to make NERF a place where people feel comfortable starting conversations, exchanging ideas and building relationships that continue long after an event has finished.

Whether from local authorities, academia, the private sector, charities or community organisations, our members all share a common ambition: finding better ways to reduce waste, use resources more efficiently and create a more sustainable future for the North East. That spirit of collaboration is at the heart of NERF.

The NERF Awards, launched last year, were created to celebrate the innovation, commitment and excellence already happening across our region. They give attendees the opportunity to hear about the fantastic initiatives and projects making a real difference across the North East, while also creating space for people to meet, exchange ideas and discover new opportunities to work together.

At the awards ceremony at Newcastle Civic Centre last November, Best Newcomer winner Dr Oktay Cetinkaya from Newcastle University met the team from REfUSE CIC, winners of the Best Waste Minimisation Award. They quickly recognised a shared interest in tackling food waste from different, but highly complementary, perspectives.

Dr Cetinkaya's Waste-Not! project is developing affordable, machine learning-powered sensors capable of objectively assessing food freshness. By monitoring gases and odours inside refrigerators and environmental parameters around them, the technology aims to identify when food is genuinely nearing spoilage, reducing reliance on guesswork and helping prevent perfectly good food from being thrown away.

For REfUSE, whose mission is to intercept surplus food and ensure it reaches people rather than a landfill, the potential was immediately obvious.

Following their introduction through NERF, the two organisations began trialling the Waste-Not! sensors in the walk-in refrigerator at REfUSE Café’s kitchen. REfUSE sometimes collect food that is close to its best before date but is still perfectly edible for up to many months after this date. They wanted to explore how the technology could support food management by providing additional evidence that rescued food remained safe to use, while also helping prevent items from being forgotten at the back of storage and becoming waste unnecessarily.

It's a practical partnership that combines cutting-edge academic research with the experience of an organisation working every day to reduce food waste in our communities.

This collaboration is exactly what the North East Recycling Forum exists to encourage. By creating opportunities for people from different parts of the sector to connect, we're helping to break down silos between academia, industry, local government and the voluntary sector. When expertise is shared and different perspectives come together, innovation moves more quickly from promising ideas to practical action. The partnership between Newcastle University and REfUSE is a great example of how those conversations can turn into meaningful collaboration with real-world impact.

Seeing this collaboration grow from a conversation at a NERF event is a fantastic

example of the value of bringing our sector together. It reminds us that while celebrating success is important, the conversations sparked along the way can be just as valuable.

We look forward to following the progress of the REfUSE and Waste-Not! partnership and to seeing many more connections like this develop through the North East Recycling Forum in the years ahead.

You can now apply for the 2026 NERF Awards, here.