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

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the Deposit Scheme for Drinks Containers (England and Northern Ireland) Regulations 2024 on the ability of waste disposal authorities to generate an income from disposing of recyclable materials.

The DRS (Deposit Return Scheme) aims to reduce littering of in-scope containers. Once the DRS is operational, our Impact Assessment analysis estimates savings to local authority street cleaning costs of around £30 million per year.

Many of the containers not returned through the scheme may continue to travel through local authority waste streams such as kerbside recycling. The introduction of a DRS has a varying impact on local authorities recycling collections; there may be efficiency savings from collecting and processing less material, however we also understand the DRS will remove a material from local authority recycling streams. Details can be found in the Final Impact Assessment.

We anticipate the scheme administrator – the Deposit Management Organisation – working closely with local authorities to ensure as much material is returned as possible and to help meet collection targets and keep material within the closed-loop model of the DRS.