Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging

Robin Millar Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dame Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered extended producer responsibility for packaging.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I share with many, including the Minister, I am sure, a huge concern about the amount of plastic and packaging waste that is never collected or recycled and that ends up in landfill, in our seas or in incinerators, thus polluting our land, sea and air. We are all aware of the hierarchy of waste—reduce, reuse, recycle—and the challenges that it poses. It is vital that we tackle waste and increase recycling, including through legislation and the extended producer responsibility guidance, but the scheme must be well designed so that it incentivises appropriate behaviours. I have every sympathy with the Minister: that is not an easy task.

I can understand, too, if there is some criticism of, or perhaps cynicism about, the concerns voiced by industry, because of course industry is bound to be concerned by any new tax imposed on it. However, there is general support in industry for the “producer pays” principle. Industry wants a system that is fair, and I share its serious concerns about some of the unintended consequences of the scheme. The Food and Drink Federation says the industry has significant concerns that the proposed system will fail to achieve improvements in recycling rates, and is calling on the Department to be more ambitious in its proposals by adopting international best practice from the most successful schemes around the world.

Before addressing more general points, let me share my concerns about how the current proposals will affect Wiltshire Farm Foods, which provides ready-made meals in plastic trays that are covered with a thin polythene film. It delivers those meals to householders who can then put them in their freezers and heat them up when they need them. Customers receive regular deliveries from Wiltshire Farm Foods to their doorsteps. The company saw that as an opportunity for its delivery staff to collect the used trays when they arrive with a fresh delivery. For good measure, it also reuses the cardboard boxes that the trays are carried in.

Wiltshire Farm Foods’ customer base is made up predominantly of a generation who are used to washing and putting out the milk bottles on the doorstep. Their conscientious washing and storing of the used trays enables the company to make the collections. The company does not used a cardboard sleeve, although one is commonly found on similar products. The necessary information is put on the plastic film, which is the only thing left for the customer to dispose of. Wiltshire Farm Foods leaves behind 97% less packaging by weight than other ready meal brands because the customers return the trays.

In late 2021, the company went one step further. It made a significant investment in a world-leading packaging recycling initiative in its factory in Durham. Through its award-winning “boomerang” project, it now takes the used plastic CPET—crystalline polyethylene terephthalate —meal trays and genuinely recycles them by making them into new trays. The composition of the new trays is up to 85% recycled tray material. That should be recognised as a significant achievement because it is much more challenging to recycle plastics than metal and glass, which can be recycled through the use of well-established technologies.

In establishing the facility in Durham, Wiltshire Farm Foods has also onshored the process. It both keeps jobs here and reduces plastic miles. It is genuine closed-loop recycling and an exemplar approach to the recycling and reuse of packaging. It puts the company ahead of the legislation. Can we find a way to refine the proposed legislation to recognise that? We must give credit where credit is due.

[Robin Millar (Aberconwy) (Con)]

My constituent, Laura Fielding, is a community councillor in Llanfairfechan, and is behind the excellent plastic-free Llanfairfechan scheme. She highlighted my duty, as a consumer, in respect of wrapping and packaging after the point of consumption. Does the hon. Member agree that the same applies to manufacturers and producers? Their responsibility for packaging lies beyond the point of sale, and even beyond the point of use, and extends to its disposal and the consideration of what that means for the packaging afterwards.

[Dame Nia Griffith]

Absolutely. As I understand it, that is the aim of the extended producer responsibility legislation: it will ensure that producers have to take a real interest in that process. However, it must be done in partnership with the industry and in a way that the industry feels part of. The scheme must have buy-in, because it can work only with industry co-operation. We must ensure that it operates fairly and that those who invest extra money to improve their processes get some benefit from doing so.

Last month, in response to a written parliamentary question about whether the charges to be introduced by the extended producer responsibility for packaging will apply only to packaging that enters the consumer waste system, the Minister replied:

“Charges for the management of this waste will apply to all primary and shipment packaging except where producers can evidence that their packaging has been emptied and discarded by a business.”

In response to a different question from the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) regarding how the revised scheme would apply to closed-loop recycling schemes, the Minister replied:

“Packaging that is already commonly collected from households will not be eligible for this offset as this would reduce the efficiency of household collections”.

That is a major problem for a company like Wiltshire Farm Foods. We are effectively equating what it does with plastic trays with plastic waste that enters the waste system.

I am concerned about that statement because, unfortunately, what we know about recyclable waste items that should be collected by local authorities and recycled is not at all encouraging. First, there are all the packaging items that do not go into household recycling boxes or bags but are strewn about the place as litter or put into a non-recyclable street bin. That is hardly a surprise, given that the Environmental Audit Committee report on plastic bottles found that only about half of local authorities provide differentiated street litter bins in order to separate recyclables from black-bag rubbish. Secondly, a householder might wrongly put that packaging into their black-bag rubbish, or in the correct household recycling bag but with unwashed items that drip food content into the bag, so that the whole bag of recyclables is condemned by the local authority and put in with the black-bag rubbish.

Even if recyclable packaging items get into the recycling bag or box correctly, what happens then? We have myriad different regimes run by different local authorities, with varying end destinations for their recyclables. Some 47% of recyclables are sent abroad. What data do we have about the products that they are made into? Too little, it would seem. Too often, we have seen pictures of packaging on foreign shores that can be traced back to the UK, smouldering on the hillside in open landfill or clogging up waterways, as documented by the BBC, Greenpeace and Interpol, and highlighted by the National Audit Office, which reported, putting it mildly, that there is

“a particular risk that some of the material exported overseas is not fully recycled.”

What do we know about the rest? We know that glass is 100% recyclable and can be remelted endlessly without ever reducing its quality, so we would hope the glass collected is fully recycled and made into new items. Plastic packaging, however, is another matter. How much of what local authorities collect as recyclable is actually made into new products? What data does the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have, not just on what is collected and handed on by local authorities, but on what actually happens to it, the efficiencies of the processes that it undergoes, the end products that are produced, and the value for money and for energy use that are achieved through the schemes?

Official estimates show the UK’s plastic packaging waste recycling rate at 47% in 2020 and 44% in 2021. Those estimates have been questioned by various organisations, including the National Audit Office, which expressed concerns about undetected fraud, as well as the concern that I mentioned about what goes abroad. Anyway, the amount would appear to be less than 50%.

We now face a situation in which a company such as Wiltshire Farm Foods has invested in a closed-loop system, collecting plastic trays and using the whole plastic tray to manufacture new ones, yet it will be taxed as if its trays just went into the waste system where, as we have seen, potentially only 50% of the trays would be recycled. The Minister has repeated that in a letter to the company—the problem that the trays will be equated with household waste and cannot be considered as any form of exception or betterment, because technically they could have gone into householders’ recycling waste bags or boxes.

The packaging may be commonly collected from households but, as I have explained, its final destination will vary according to the regimes in place in individual local authorities, and it has a less than 50% chance of being recycled, whereas 100% of the trays collected by Wiltshire Farm Foods will be taken back to Durham and manufactured into new trays. The problem is that firms get no credit for trying to maximise the collection and recycling of their packaging. That is a massive disincentive to make any such investment, whereas they could help to improve our plastic packaging recycling rates, as well as the efficiency and quality of that recycling; otherwise, there is no reason for them to do so.

I do not pretend for one moment that to devise an extended producer responsibility scheme is easy. Such schemes will be dependent on co-operation from industry if they are to work effectively, and it is vital that there is proper consultation and a response to the concerns raised. I understand there is a plan for a blanket introduction of the scheme and then to deal with exceptions or modulated issues, as they are described, afterwards in 2025. Of course, that will penalise the firms that have already started.

Many in the food and drink industry support trying to improve the levels of recycling and understand the importance of the recyclability of packaging and the urge to reduce the use of plastic packaging altogether. In view of the concerns raised by the industry, will the Minister consider pausing the introduction of the EPR scheme and use the time to work productively with manufacturers on their concerns and, in particular, to derive and refine a fair payments regime? Will the EPR rates vary according to the costs of managing different materials, depending on how easily they can be recycled and the final market price they can attract? Will the Minister consider having reduced EPR rates for firms that have invested or are investing in innovative recycling methods? As I have mentioned, the scheme begins in 2024, but the modulated fees whereby the more recyclable a material is, the less the producer pays will not be introduced until 2025. Will the Minister consider introducing the modulated fees at the same time as the main scheme?

How much analysis has the Department done of schemes in operation in other countries? Belgium, Germany and the Canadian province of Ontario are often cited as interesting examples. Does the Minister plan to look further at schemes elsewhere? A number of countries have much greater industry involvement in the running of their schemes, whereas in the proposed UK scheme almost all the necessary tasks to run the scheme will be carried out by the Government. Will the Minister consider greater private sector and industry-body involvement in the schemes? Will she explain how EPR funds will be ringfenced to ensure they are used to improve our recycling infrastructure? Will she take into account the impact of all packaging reforms on producers, and weigh up whether they will have the desired impact without creating an undue burden on them?

On that note, I shall draw my remarks to a close. I thank Wiltshire Farm Foods for showing me its trays and how it recycles them—I was not quite as keen on the minus 20° freezer room that it showed me. I implore the Minister to take that example very seriously, because it has ramifications across the industry for incentivising—or disincentivising—firms so that they do the right thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.