There is more stress over DRS as UK waste policy seemingly falls apart. But new laws are sprouting up everywhere in Brussels. By David Burrows.
After a crisis of identity earlier this month, there is a more relaxed feel about The (Plastics) Package as attention turns to INC-5 – the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. It is, as some might say, ‘squeaky bum time’.
Those who have been watching things closely over the past 20 months or so (this treaty is being put together at lightening speed) have to remain optimistic (at least in public) that a robust, legally binding deal can be signed off. “Real world expectations versus my hopes and dreams are probably two quite different things at the moment,” said Christina Dixon in a podcast just before she headed out to Busan, South Korea with the team at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). There are high stakes and high pressure to get something done… but the 350 million tonne (the amount of plastic produced annually, of which 0.5% ends up the oceans) question is what that something is.
As Dixon explained, the COP16 biodiversity and COP29 climate talks will have set the political mood for the next week or so at INC-5. The biodiversity talks didn’t finish as many campaigners had hoped but there were some important milestones. COP29 is still underway but suggestions it could end up like that infamous Copenhagen episode in 2009 are concerning. Will a disastrous COP29 lead to an incredible INC-5? Let’s see. As EIA’s Jacob Kean-Hammerson suggested: hopefully reason and ambition prevails.
Which brings us to another important meeting: the Foodservice Packaging Association’s (FPA) annual environment seminar. This year’s get-together had a decent mix of potential (how to scale reusable packaging on the high street), policy (a fast, frenzied and frightening look at the EU regulations on single-use packaging) and problems (the muddled situation over packaging extended producer responsibility fees was described as “a bit like charging for VAT when you don’t know the rate”).
Hierarchy? What hierarchy?
In the week of the seminar news had filtered through that waste processing company Viridor was closing its plastics recycling plant due to “persistently and increasingly challenging market conditions, and the absence of planned legislation to increase rates of plastic recycling in the UK [and] recycling rates are below where they were projected to be in 2020”. A day later it was revealed that the company was close to securing the financials for a massive energy-from-waste plant. (A case of one Viridor closing and another opening, if you will).
“Waste policy is broken and [these] two stories […] show why,” wrote Anthesis associate director Michael Lenaghan on social media. “The economics speak for themselves,” he explained, and “whether intentional or not, waste policy supports burning waste far more effectively than it does recycling it. You can’t blame companies like Viridor for following the money, but you can blame governments for pointing in the wrong direction.”
Green Alliance has just published an attempt to nudge the new Labour government back on track. Its new paper – ‘Getting on track for a circular economy: how the government can avoid mistakes of the past’ – details all the missed deadlines of that promising resources and waste strategy of 2018. By last year we should have had pEPR (full implementation will now happen from next year) and a deposit return scheme (DRS), which is now expected in 2027. Or never.
DR-Stress
This month Wales announced it was dropping out of the UK-wide DRS scheme because it just wasn’t ambitious enough. Deputy first minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, taking delight in referencing Wales’ world-leading performance on recycling, said (and we paraphrase): ‘We already have high levels of high quality recycling of drinks containers in Wales (and far better recycling rates generally than you). We want glass included in a DRS and want it to push reuse too, and a UK scheme does not provide that for us.’ Which is fair enough.
One can only imagine the reaction in Holyrood, which pulled the plug on its own scheme and gave up pushing for glass to be included (see previous Packages here and here for the background on that). Westminster could not seem to care less: it’ll carry on with what appears to be an increasingly fruitless journey with Scotland and Northern Ireland. Regulations should be laid in England and Northern Ireland this month, and then next April the Deposit Management Organisations will be appointed.
Paul Sanderson from The Recycling Association (which is ‘the voice of the UK recycling industry’) said why not just give up? “With Wales pulling out of the UK DRS, now is the perfect time to abandon this folly,” he said. “Instead, let’s focus on introducing the important extended producer responsibility and simpler recycling regimes.” His argument is that people are used to recycling drinks containers at home, so why change the habit of a lifetime? Umm, on-the-go, Paul (And there is also an argument that deposit and return approaches will, in time, help support and scale reusable packaging systems).
Let’s be clear: recycling rates won’t improve overnight with a DRS. Perfecting the systems in places like Norway, which recycles 97% of plastic bottles, took years. Non-refillable beverage packaging offered for sale in Norway carries both a basic levy and an environmental levy. The size of the environmental levy falls as the rate of packaging returns increases. And once the return rate reaches 95%, it ceases to be applied at all. Infinitum, which administers the system, demanded changes to bottle design to simplify the whole process. “To recycle well, you need standardisation,” reported Wired magazine in its recent climate issue. “The tax gives infinitum the power to enforce simplicity.”
Wired for change
That piece – ‘Toward a more fantastic plastic’ – is worth a read. There are some impressive examples of returnable systems too, though the one thing the startups crave is a level playing field. The only way to force a mass change in behaviour is with regulation, noted Jason Hawkins from Reusables, and that means banning single-use.
Politicians don’t seem fearful of bans per se, but the ones so far have had unintended consequences, forcing single-use switches rather than reuse and reduction (the next time I get given a paper straw without asking for one I’m going to stick it in my eye). Capri Sun Group has actually called upon the European Commission to allow the re-introduction of its plastic straws. “Our old pouch was made of multiple materials and couldn’t be recycled,” reads a petition on Change.org which has garnered more than 161,000 signatures. “Earlier this year, we introduced a new pouch made from recyclable mono-material (PP). Our goal is to bring back recyclable plastic straws so that both the pouch and the straw can be recycled together.”
The rules in the EU in relation to packaging were summarised for the FPA audience by Eamonn Bates, secretary general at 360° Foodservice. It was a dizzying delivery that will have left many in a spin. “There is a perfect storm coming for the foodservice packaging world and you are totally unaware of this,” he warned. Bans are coming, for example, for those who cannot prove recycling rates of at least 55% by 2035.
Bates talked of a “radical shakeup” of the foodservice packaging value chain – and not just for plastic packaging but paper packaging too (which also has the delayed EU deforestation regulations looming over it). Companies will be held accountable and the good guys and the bad guys will be exposed, he explained.
The single-use products directive (SUPD) also represents a “paradigm shift” from single-use to reuse, though member states appear to be transposing it incorrectly (or late), he noted. It also contradicts the packaging and package waste directive (PPWR). And to those who thought the lobbying of the past few months – for example around PPWR, see Packages past here and here and report here – had “solved the problem” they had better think again: “That’s rubbish,” Bates said.
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