Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken to (a) improve recycling infrastructure and (b) reduce plastic waste exports.

In the Resources and Waste Strategy, we have committed to taking actions which will help to stimulate private investment in reprocessing and recycling infrastructure.

We are introducing Collection and Packaging Reforms made up of Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging, Simpler Recycling and a Deposit Return Scheme for drinks containers. Through these reforms we want to significantly increase domestic reprocessing and recycling capacity by both increasing investors’ confidence and improving the competitiveness of UK reprocessing.

Our existing Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulations have led to investment in waste infrastructure to process end of life electrical and electronic equipment.

We encourage the development of infrastructure for plastic reprocessing to ensure the UK meets its recycling targets as well as supporting these collection and packaging reforms.

Additionally, HM Treasury’s plastic packaging tax is expected to increase demand for secondary material plastic and increasing reprocessing infrastructure will help meet this demand. Reprocessing infrastructure enables the value of resource use to be maximised as well as waste arisings and its impact on the environment to be minimised.

These actions are all intended to increase the amount of plastic waste we recycle domestically so we can reduce our dependency on plastic waste exports.