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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to ensure that pubs are not charged twice for recycling glass bottles under Extended Producer Responsibility rules.

Packaging Extended Producer Responsibility (pEPR) obligates brands and packaging producers to pay the costs of managing household packaging waste. In most cases, this will not be individual pubs but the business supplying the pub with packaged goods. It is up to individual producers whether to pass these costs on to their customers. The pEPR fees are intended to incentivise producers to use less packaging and to ensure the packaging they do use is environmentally sustainable. For example, where producers use reusable packaging, they will only pay a pEPR fee the first time it is used. Reuse will therefore provide a significant decrease in fees and customers, such as pubs, will see a decrease in waste management costs.

Industry is already making progress in this area, the British Beer and Pub Association and ABInbev recently hosted a well-attended glass bottle reuse workshop where UK glass reuse trials were showcased. This included a Greene King trial which started with 25 pubs last year and which will soon be expanded to several hundred pubs, and the multi-retailer glass reuse trial that is due to start in Newport later this year.