Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging

Rebecca Pow Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)]

It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair, Mr Sharma; I know this subject is of great interest to you, as is litter, which the House just had an Adjournment debate on. It all comes into the sphere we are dealing with. I thank the hon. Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith) for bringing this debate on extended producer responsibility to Westminster Hall. I am pleased to have the opportunity to outline our schemes in more detail. She asked a great raft of questions, so if I do not cover all the answers, we will write to her on some of the outstanding issues, although I know some of issues have been dealt with in answers to parliamentary questions.

The hon. Lady and I share some agreement about the need for the schemes we are introducing and the fact that they are complex. The schemes will definitely take us in the right direction on reducing our waste. We agree on the shared goal, which is to implement a successful UK-wide scheme that serves to improve recycling and the availability of recycled materials for reuse, to drive down pollution, and to ensure that the cost of packaging waste no longer relies so heavily on the public purse. After four years of extensive engagement across the packaging sectors, the policy framework to introduce an extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging across the United Kingdom was outlined in the Government response published in March 2022. Work is continuing to make progress in preparation for its implementation.

Although affected businesses have consistently expressed their support for high-level extended producer responsibility objectives and outcomes, some concerns have been raised about costs, implementation and timelines. I am well aware of that, as other colleagues in this Chamber have raised some of these matters with me. I reassure the hon. Member for Llanelli and others that my Department remains committed to continued intense engagement with affected businesses to ensure that we deliver our UK extended producer responsibility scheme in a way that delivers on the shared goals to transform a linear economic model of “take, make, use, throw away” to a circular economy. Our aim is for legislation to be in place in time to start the EPR in 2024-25, as the hon. Lady mentioned.

Before I go further, I will outline how we got to this point and the rationale for the delivery of the EPR programme. In December 2018, the Government published the resources and waste strategy, which set out how we will preserve our stock of material resources by minimising waste, promoting resource efficiency and moving towards the circular economy. Three significant commitments in the strategy form the collection and packaging reforms programme. Those are the extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging—the EPR—which we are discussing; the deposit return scheme for drinks containers, known as the DRS; and the consistency in recycling collection scheme, known simply as consistency. That is the consistency of collection at the doorstep by local authorities.

The idea is that they dovetail together. They will help us to deliver our goals on protecting the climate, driving green growth and driving down unnecessary waste—all goals set out by this Government and the devolved Administrations in their policy documents. As a result of our reforms, particularly in relation to the EPR, we expect the figure for recycling rigid plastics—excluding drinks bottles in the DRS—to reach 48% by 2025, broadly comparable with what Wiltshire Farm Foods are doing at the moment. By 2030, we expect that to rise significantly to about 62%. That is the direction in which we aim to drive all packaging producers.

The overall objective of the EPR scheme is to encourage businesses to consider how much packaging they use, and to design and use packaging that is much easier to recycle, and to encourage the use of reusables, refillables and so forth. We have committed to setting ambitious new packaging waste recycling targets for producers. The EPR measures will be key to achieving the targets. We propose minimum recycling target rates from 2024-30 for each of the six packaging materials: plastic, wood, aluminium, steel, paper and card, and glass. We will introduce targets for fibre-based composite packaging in 2026.

EPR will allow businesses to make their own arrangements to collect and recycle their packaging, where local authorities are not required to collect those packaging items for recycling. EPR will incentivise producers to recycle packaging that is reused multiple times, such as milk bottles, and to offset the packaging that they recycle against their obligated disposal costs. However, EPR will not allow for offsetting of packaging where it is collected by more than 75% of local authorities, except where it is part of a reuse system. That is primarily because we will take steps, through our consistency measures, to place requirements on local authorities to collect, for recycling, at least the common set of materials that I outlined.

If we incentivise producers to collect their own packaging, which we are also requiring local authorities to collect, that will reduce the efficiency of kerbside collections overall and therefore increase costs for producers. It will undermine that system, which will be a cornerstone of the whole triage.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

What plans does the Minister have to sort out where the recyclable rubbish ends up? One of the big concerns is that not every local authority takes it to a place where it is 100% reused.

[Rebecca Pow]

That is a really important part of the circle and of our engagement. It is a question of ensuring that we have industry capable of taking all that material. We are working together in a pipeline, because clearly the system will not work unless that is all joined up.

To go back to my previous point, if producers all start to do their own thing and the kerbside collection is undermined, that will increase costs for the producers that are going through that system, because it will mean that the costs are spread over a lower tonnage of packaging waste collected. If we look across industry as a whole, we see that that would not be in the interests of the development of our circular economy ethos. We will publish the Government response to the consistency in collections consultation shortly. That will give more clarity to the whole issue very soon.

Through payment of disposal costs, businesses will pay for the collection and management of their packaging from households. We want to increase kerbside recycling through consistency and the EPR measures, and to do so in a way that optimises efficient and high-performing services. When the payments are calculated, that will be based on the efficient services of local authorities. We do not want that to be based on a less efficient authority, so we will follow the best models and expect local authorities to do that. We have complete agreement on that with business. I think that that particular point was raised.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. What did my hon. Friend the Minister make of the suggestion from the hon. Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith) that there should be more private sector involvement in the operation of our EPR system?

[Rebecca Pow]

I thank my hon. Friend, who has made valuable contributions to this discussion and debate. I cannot stress enough that we are working closely with industry and want to continue to do so. I have had a lot of conversations about this particular issue, and it is really important that we involve business as much as we can. I cannot say more now, but that has definitely been noted, because after all, businesses are the ones with the experience and the knowledge. We need them to get on board with us.

We want to incentivise reusable and refillable packaging. The hon. Member for Llanelli outlined in some detail the example of Wiltshire Farm Foods, which made really significant strides before all these schemes came on board, thinking outside the box and doing its own recycling, and so forth. There must be even more potential, one would have thought, for it to look at reusing its packaging and encouraging reuse takeaway-style. I would be happy to meet that company. It would be interesting to explore further what we might learn from it or how it could take on the model that I am suggesting to make it work. A next phase of policy development that we are looking at is to encourage the use of reusable packaging, because that is a really important part of this.

We appreciate that these reforms affect business operations. We have been listening to the feedback and have already amended the proposals, following the consultation. We will continue to work closely on the design of the scheme and the delivery. We have run some eight-week workshops, like speed dating, and lots of useful material has come out of that. We will be doing much more.

EPR is a longer-term endeavour in the continuous improvement and reform of our collection and packaging services and we are looking at other schemes around the world. I went with a whole team from DEFRA and others to Belgium to look at their system, as they are world leaders in this and have been running their scheme for a very long time. Ours is different because we are introducing it later, when lots of businesses have had their own thoughts and ideas. We cannot just completely copy what they are doing in Belgium, because we are a slightly different example, but we certainly learned some very good lessons from going there. We will continue to engage with business and industry.

[Robin Millar]

Will the Minister give way?

[Rebecca Pow]

I will very quickly before I wind up.

[Robin Millar]

The Minister has twice mentioned that she has been over to the continent to see exemplars and learn from those who are further down this path than us, which I think is a terrific step. Has she given consideration to her point about the reuse of recycled materials? I hear concerns that the availability of that material is becoming a key issue. Larger players are consuming or using up large amounts, making it less available for smaller manufacturers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Rebecca Pow]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which we are discussing with industry. It is critical that we have enough material to put back into the system and that our measures on exporting and so forth all play into that space, in terms of how much goes abroad, whether that is being constructively used, and cracking down on illegally exporting waste and keeping it in this country. All those points are part of the whole circular economy issue.

We will continue to focus on delivering our EPR scheme, and the overall ethos is to protect the environment, improve management of packaging waste and transition us towards implementing the scheme.

Question put and agreed to.