UK Government Weighs Raising Corporate Recycling Payments

(Photo: Scrap metal readied for recycling in the UK. Credit: Tony Hisgett, Flickr Creative Commons)

by | Nov 13, 2018

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UK

(Photo: Scrap metal readied for recycling in the UK. Credit: Tony Hisgett, Flickr Creative Commons)

Ministers in the UK are mulling a waste strategy that calls for supermarkets, retailers, and major drinks brands to pay millions of pounds to recycle their used packaging, the Guardian reports. The new strategy is expected to be published in the next few weeks.

Sources with knowledge of the new waste strategy told journalist Sandra Laville that it calls for increasing retailer and producer contributions from an average of about £70 million ($89.95 million) a year to between £500 million and £1 billion ($642 million to $1.29 billion) a year.

“Supermarkets and other major producers of packaging waste currently pay a small fraction of the cost of collecting and recycling the 11 million [metric tons] of packaging waste produced in the UK,” Laville wrote. “Ministers are considering several options to improve recycling, stop abuses to the export market in plastic packaging, and make companies pay more towards collecting and recycling their own waste.”

Citing National Audit Office information, Laville reported that last year local authorities spent around $900 million to collect and sort recycling in the country — far more than the nearly $90 million major business contributed. Most waste gets exported rather than processed in the UK, although the Chinese ban on imported plastic waste has made this an even bigger challenge.

British resource recovery company Axion Group determined earlier this year that the collection, sorting, and recycling infrastructure needed for flexible packaging in the UK would require an investment of around $120 million. “The big problem is the lack of adequate facilities designed to process these largely-recyclable materials,” Richard McKinlay, Axion’s head of circular economy, said in April.

Last month the Financial Times reported that the UK government plans to start taxing the import and manufacture of all plastic packaging that is not recyclable. The tax on packaging containing less than 30% recycled material is expected to drive demand for recycled materials, and change the economics for sustainable packaging.

At the same time, major corporations continue to form partnerships with TerraCycle in the UK to launch programs for recycling specific products and packaging. In the past few weeks, that has included Colgate for oral care and Kellogg Company for Pringles.

Nestlé UK sits on the government advisory committee on packaging that is currently participating in discussions about the new government waste strategy. The company says it supports a plan that will result in a well-functioning, consistent waste collection and recycling scheme, particularly one that stimulates a circular economy for packaging, according to the Guardian.

“Ministers are likely to put forward up to four options to extend producer responsibility payments in the new waste strategy by the end of the year,” Laville wrote. “These vary from retailers and producers directly funding local authorities’ recycling collections to a levy that would trickle down to local councils.”

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