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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to provide local authorities with the appropriate facilities to enable them to recycle all kinds of plastics.

The Government considers that local authorities are best placed to make decisions about the management of waste under their control, taking into account local needs, the waste hierarchy and the authority’s waste management strategy.

Working through the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the Government is developing and delivering activities in support of the use of recycled materials in new products and activities to stimulate its demand. For example, the Plastics Industry Recycling Action Plan has identified key actions that need to take place across the whole supply chain to ensure that recycling plastics packaging can be done sustainably. This includes design for recyclability, collections and sorting, reprocessing and development of sustainable end markets. In September this year, WRAP and an industry advisory group published a framework for greater consistency in recycling. Actions from this framework aim to identify opportunities to rationalise packaging formats (in particular plastic packaging) to those that are recyclable and for which there is a steady market, and to help local authorities to recycle a greater variety of plastics.