Questions over whether the government and the industry can successfully up their game in the war on plastic surfaced again in Westminster today in what is fast becoming a recurring theme.
The latest figures suggest more than a quarter of all plastic packaging placed on the UK market is in the form of film and flexible packaging (450 kilotonnes of the stuff according to Wrap). Results from a landmark industry trial show the potential solution for this truly shocking level of environmental pollution.
In the three-year FlexCollect trial, which was backed by the likes of Unilever, Nestlé and PepsiCo, 10 local authorities collected flexible plastic from household kerbsides in a rehearsal of what the government’s so-called Simpler Recycling legislation will make mandatory come March 2027.
The good news is the project showed such a scheme can attract huge buy-in from consumers, with the trials generating nearly 400 tonnes of flexible plastic, almost 80% of which was “target material” suitable for recycling.
Even better, the trials showed all this could be done for less than £2 a year per household, which should allay fears within the industry over the pricetag of funding such services – which it will of course bear thanks to the incoming extended producer responsibility (EPR) packaging tax.
Experts who presented the trial’s findings to Defra minister Mary Creagh in Westminster today claim more than 150,000 tonnes of flexible plastic could be recycled across the UK if such schemes are successfully rolled out nationally.
Yet the trial also reveals the huge capacity challenges faced by the industry and government if it is to achieve this potential.
Capacity crisis
A study from Wrap in the spring showed only 7% of flexible plastic is currently recycled. And there are less than two years to go before the government’s mandatory requirements come into play. So the question of how to build the capacity for all the plastic bags, confectionery wrappers, foil, plastic film and other materials currently with no end market is a looming crisis which needs to be solved – and fast.
Even more fundamental than the current lack of kerbside services is the lack of capacity in recycling facilities, with the FlexCollect trial confirming the UK is currently well short of the capacity needed to meet the demands from 2027.
It found the industry was holding back on investment due to the lack of a market for food-grade flexible packaging from recycled material, warning it could be 10 years before the UK is in a position to provide this at scale.
Read more: Kerbside plastic trial highlights recycling capacity crisis
Whilst the report said there was some hope on the horizon with planned increased facilities in the UK as well as spare capacity in Europe, it also illustrates a disastrous failure of the UK plastic tax to tackle the issue of throwaway plastic going on to the market – one which has also had the undesired side effect of sucking investment out of new recycling facilities.
Introduced with a cost of £200 per tonne in 2022 and currently sitting at £223.69, the tax was supposed to be a game-changer in shifting the industry away from single-use plastic.
Instead the market has found itself flooded with imported plastic packaging, much of it from non-EU countries and much of it, as previously revealed by The Grocer, falsely claiming to contain recycled content.
As today’s report concludes: “UK facilities simply can’t compete on a level playing field commercial basis with material produced by countries with an entirely different cost base and greater access to feedstock material.”
Countries in the EU are also now reporting a wave of closures of recycling facilities due to this influx of dodgy packaging.
In the UK recyclers are, claims today’s report, being increasingly made “commercially unviable, due to having to compete with cheap imports of virgin packaging and packaging with recycled content from countries with a significantly lower cost base and greater access to material”.
With the food & drink and packaging supply chain facing reduced demand from this tsunami of cheaper virgin plastic, whilst at the same time in the grip of sky-high energy prices, ministers face an enormous challenge ahead to create the conditions that will allow the March 2027 deadline for councils to start collecting flexible plastic to achieve anything like its potential.
Without an end market for the huge quantities of flexible plastic that could be collected from household kerbsides, the plans will never achieve their potential and the war on plastic will suffer another very serious setback.
In fact, in stark contrast to the strategy’s name, the job will be anything but ‘simple’.
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