Pillar 5: Packaging

The UK Government is introducing a suite of policy changes for the management of packaging and packaging waste known as the Collection and Packaging Reforms. These reforms focus around three central pillars: Extended Producer Responsibility, a Deposit Return Scheme and the introduction of Simpler Recycling, to bring a national approach to collection of waste and recyclable materials.

Industry fully supports the objectives behind these reforms to improve circular outcomes for packaging, building on the progress started by the Plastic Packaging Tax.

Part of this will be achieved by greater investment in and optimisation of collection and recycling infrastructure, scaling up the ambition started by the UK Plastics Pact by WRAP in 2018 as a voluntary initiative to improve the circularity of plastics. The UKPP is currently being updated for 2030.

Whilst accounting for only 3% of the food sector’s emissions, packaging, especially the disposal of used packaging, can have negative and highly visible environmental impacts when it is not kept within the circular economy and allowed to litter our land and pollute our oceans. The UN has declared that plastic pollution in our oceans is a ‘planetary crisis’.

Despite industry commitment, delays in bringing in other government policy interventions, means that the UK is stuck in a rut with flat recycling rates.

For the sector to make progress, the key policy changes needed to create a circular economy for packaging are the Collection and Packaging Reforms.

Within these, increased investment in recycling infrastructure (for collection, sorting and reprocessing), moving towards a producer leadership model for EPR, the introduction of consistent collections (including for flexible plastics), and introduction of a DRS are key requirements for the sector that need to be implemented speedily across all four nations.