Defra has admitted defeat in its plan to roll out extended producer responsibility (EPR) for packaging in 2023.
The department wrote to stakeholders this week to inform them that implementation of the scheme would be delayed. The packaging recovery note system will therefore continue next year.
Reports suggested the decision to postpone the scheme followed concerns that the original timetable gave insufficient time for businesses to prepare for new data reporting requirements and for the scheme administrator to mobilise.
EPR is designed to flip the financial burden of dealing with packaging from local authorities (and taxpayers) to businesses. Packaging that is difficult to recycle will attract higher fees.
The proposals also include mandatory recycling labels and a takeback scheme for single-use cups.
There was little surprise at the news given the scale of the changes, the volume of responses to last year’s consultation and the covid-19 pandemic.
“This delay isn’t the fault of anyone,” Martin Kersh, executive director at the Foodservice Packaging Association told Footprint, and it would be “crazy to rush this”, he added.
Colin Church, CEO at the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining, said the potential for these changes to make “a very positive difference to recycling and the move to a more circular economy is huge and we must seize this once in a generation opportunity fully”.
Still, delays to EPR, as well as a deposit return scheme and harmonised kerbside collections, are creating a “vacuum of uncertainty”, said the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee.
No new timeline has been set and LARAC warned that some councils might not be able to implement the changes until 2030 or later due to waste management contract cycles.
The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management called on Defra to provide clarity “as soon as possible as so many are awaiting the design of the new system, as well as the much-needed funding payments for packaging waste”.
Defra received 1,241 responses to its consultation on EPR, as well as a further 2,590 and 896 for the ones on a DRS and consistent household and business waste collections. All three were closed by early July 2021.
The department said it was still analysing responses to the consultation and an update was expected “shortly”.
