Glass Packaging: Extended Producer Responsibility

Debate between Sarah Champion and Andy Slaughter

Wednesday 14th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion]

I agree 100%. These consequences —one hopes that they are unintended consequences—are the stark evidence that has been put to the Minister, but seemingly it is not making any difference.

I go back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay made. EPR is intended to apply to household waste only. As pubs and similar businesses already pay for their packaging waste collection via commercial contracts, they are being charged double.

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. She is pointing out the double counting and the effect of EPR. I have 19 pubs and Fuller’s brewery in my constituency, and they employ about 4,000 people. With all the other pressures on pubs and the hospitality industry at the moment, this is a bridge too far. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to reconsider this?

[Sarah Champion]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend: the Government need to pause, and I will go on to argue why they need to do that.

One of the problems is that packaging producers are unable to exclude these products from their EPR liability. There is no way out for pubs and hospitality businesses other than to pay. The Wine and Spirit Trade Association has said:

“Defra’s new rules do not work, and the vast majority of bottles sold in hospitality will pay EPR fees, completely unfairly. Defra are aware of their mistake but have admitted the issue would not be prioritised.”

Why? For brewers, the cost of glass beer bottle packaging is estimated to be more than £150 million per year. These additional costs will ultimately be passed on to the consumers. The Government themselves estimate that 85% of EPR costs will fall on the end user. With the public already facing stubbornly high costs of living and inflationary pressure, I cannot comprehend why the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is proceeding with a policy that its own analysis suggests may not meaningfully improve recycling rates. I urge the Minister to change course and step away from this madness.

Let us look in detail at this flawed scheme. The exact methodology for calculating EPR has still not been fully shared, even though it came into effect last month. The process to date has been far from transparent. Based on current illustrative fees, glass is liable for around 30% of EPR costs, while only representing around 5% of in-scope material by volume. That is because fees are calculated by weight, not volume. Glass, as a relatively heavy material, suffers unfairly because of that, yet volume is the limiting factor when collecting and processing waste, not weight.

British Glass has raised several areas that it believes are incorrect in the methodology for calculating the base fees, but it has received no certainty from DEFRA that these will be reflected in the final fees. I am aware that other packaging trade associations have serious concerns about the methodology used to create the base fees. The fee for glass currently stands at £240 per tonne, which equates to around 10p per glass bottle—significantly higher than under similar schemes in Europe.

Germany is often cited, including by DEFRA, as having a good example of a successful EPR scheme. In Germany, the fee stands at £24, or €28, per tonne of glass. I appreciate that collection methods are different in Europe so the comparison is not exact, but are we seriously expected to believe it costs 10 times as much to collect and process glass in the UK as it does in Germany?

The policy makes even less sense when we consider that brands and retailers do not buy packaging by weight, but by unit. That is why it is essential to have an EPR fee that takes into account unit numbers. Recyclable glass can be 20 times heavier than less recyclable packaging, resulting in vastly disproportionate EPR fees on glass.

When I raised these issues previously, the Minister acknowledged that the per-unit impact on glass is higher than for other materials, yet the Government have failed to address that, calling into question their repeated claim that the policy is material-neutral. That is simply not true. Glass is being penalised. The implementation of EPR leaves glass at the mercy of its competitors. Glass beverage containers have been subject to EPR fees since the start of April 2025. Competing materials such as aluminium and plastic will face no policy fees until the introduction of the DRS in, at the earliest, October 2027.