More than £1 billion will be funnelled into improving critical infrastructure and collections of recycling, Defra has confirmed.
Food industry representatives welcomed the news, which comes ahead of their first bills under the extended producer responsibility for packaging (pEPR) regulations.
For the coming year, councils in England will receive £1.1 billion to improve recycling services for residents. This could be spent on offering local residents more streamlined recycling collections, building new infrastructure or covering the costs of upgrading facilities where councils send household waste.
The pEPR scheme works by charging fees to the businesses that use packaging to meet the costs of collecting and recycling it. The costs are higher for hard to recycle materials and less where packaging can be reused or refilled.
The fees have resulted in a backlash from hospitality businesses and manufacturers of glass packaging. Defra expects 85% of businesses to raise prices because of EPR, but the WSTA believes that the number of wine and spirit producers forced to put up their prices will be greater still.
Those paying the fees had raised concerns that the funds raised through the scheme would not be used to support the infrastructure needed to improving recycling rates, deliver more circular packaging solutions and improve supplies of recycled content to displace virgin plastic. This had led to some referring to pEPR as a “packaging tax”.
Defra has said the regulation, which has been in the pipeline since 2018, will encourage businesses to reduce the amount of packaging they use, shift to more recyclable materials and design new products that can be recycled and reused more easily, stopping waste from going to the nation’s landfills or incinerators.
“With a £1.4 billion annual investment from packaging producers into EPR, we’re pleased to see the government’s commitment to ensuring these funds will be used to upgrade infrastructure and resurrect our flatlining recycling rates,” said Jim Bligh, director of corporate affairs and packaging at The Food and Drink Federation.
Libby Peake, head of resource policy at Green Alliance, said: “For too long, the costs of dealing with packaging waste and recycling have fallen unfairly on local councils and, ultimately, taxpayers, when they have no control over the packaging businesses use. It’s absolutely right that costs are now shifting to the companies who create packaging and can figure out how to use less of it in future. This is an important step in the move away from an inefficient and wasteful system.”
Circular economy minister Mary Creagh said the investment will unlock regional growth, create new green jobs across the country, and boost household recycling rates which for years have failed to show significant improvement.
Alongside pEPR, the government is introducing a deposit return scheme in 2027. This will provide a financial incentive to return empty drinks containers to a collection point, such as at their local supermarket, so that bottles or cans will be recycled.
