This dispenser of packaging tittle-tattle is left tutting (and pointing at the waste hierarchy) as industry fights latte levy and roars back at Defra’s EPR fees. By David Burrows.
Scotland has edged closer to introducing a 25p charge on single-use cups. A consultation on the so-called ‘latte levy’ highlights how use of disposable cups has almost doubled from 200 million in 2018 to 388.7 million in 2021/22. That’s about 71 cups per person, or a total of 5,400 tonnes of waste. We say ‘waste’ but we mean valuable virgin fibre (90% or 4,860 tonnes) and hard-to-recycle plastic (10%, or 540 tonnes). Some of course is bio-based plastic, and some of that is compostable.
The Scottish Government has proposed the charge “will apply regardless of cup material” and ministers are confident that the scheme will reduce the number of cups in circulation. The likes of the Foodservice Packaging Association (FPA) and the Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC) are far less convinced.
“Retailers are already taking action to improve the recycling of cups and reduce the use of disposable cups, including offering financial incentives to use reusable containers and changing materials to be more biodegradable,” explained SRC deputy head Ewan MacDonald-Russell in a statement to the press. “These proposals are poorly timed and we question if they will have a substantial impact.”
The thing is: we won’t know if this works until it’s actually introduced. The government has a specialist committee of experts (Epecom) that’s been looking at this charge and all the pros and cons for some time. They have looked at schemes in places like the Netherlands as well as various trials and experiments. They reckon it’ll work – that is, drive down consumption of single-use cups in favour of reusable ones. However, expect lots of stories around ‘hard-pressed high streets’ and the ‘cost of living crisis’ to muddy the waters.
FPA feeling and fumbling
FPA executive director Martin Kersh, the self-acclaimed thorn in policymakers’ sides, is wondering whether the charge would be complementary to the proposed mandatory takeback scheme. That scheme, which is being led by the UK Government under extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations, has been delayed.
“I just can’t get a commitment from Scottish Government that they want the takeback scheme to succeed,” Kersh explains. “I don’t agree to it being complementary,” he adds, though he doesn’t “have the evidence”; it’s more of a “feeling”.
Neil Whittall, head of sustainability at Huhtamaki, has similar reservations, albeit these are based on rather more concrete evidence provided by Wrap. “The UK-wide policy on mandatory takeback has been supported by industry bodies as a rational and forward-thinking approach to cup collection and recycling,” he explains, and “[t]his fits in with the Wrap report which […] concluded that implementing mandatory takeback and recycling targets provide the best positive net benefits as opposed to the negative net benefits of charges, full bans or partial bans”.
That was the charity’s 314-page tome which, regular readers will recall, seemed to lean heavily towards recycling more cups rather than reducing them. But it was hardly clear.
Scotland’s charge makes reduction of single-use cups the first target. Reduction of resource use sits at the top of the waste hierarchy, above reuse and recycling. The takeback scheme should help sweep up remaining disposable cups. Let’s not kid ourselves, though: they won’t all be collected and recycled.
Very, very few single-use cups are currently recycled, despite there being 6,000 drop-off points across the country. James Cropper is the UK specialist in taking used fibre cups and turning them into luxurious paper products for the likes of Islay single malt Scotch whisky brand Bruichladdich, which is owned by Rémy Cointreau, and Maison Perrier-Jouët, one of France’s most historic and distinctive champagne houses. On a visit this month the company’s fibre specialist Rob Tilsley told us they could take some 700 million fibre-based cups a year.
UK-wide the figure for disposable cups used annually is well over 2 billion. Do we need more capacity if the mandatory takeback works brilliantly? Or will that lock us in to high levels of single-use so these sites can be fed? The scheme may well improve recycling rates into double figures but beyond that … who knows? There will likely still be an awful lot of disposable cups that end up buried or burned rather than recycled because these things are hard to capture. They end up in street bins, back at offices, in the car (or flung out of the car window). There will be much more on how to overcome some of that in this autumn’s Footprint Intelligence report, which is focused on cups.
Time to move on from this topic, then? Not a bit of it, because there is news that Waitrose has reintroduced single-use cups for shoppers who are eligible for a free (Nero) coffee while they shop. “To allow more MyWaitrose members to enjoy a free hot drink, we’re trialling the introduction of takeaway cups in a small number of our shops for customers who forget to bring their reusable cups,” a Waitrose spokeswoman told The Grocer. “We’re also using the national cup recycling scheme so that any disposable cups used can be conveniently recycled.”
Ok. We can’t quite see Waitrose’s reasoning (surely these are shoppers that tut at those not holding a Fressko, or at the very least a KeepCup?). We await a full response from their head of packaging, but we’ve been told to note that it is only a trial in 10 stores for 12 weeks.
EPR you ready?
What we are not waiting for anymore is news of the modulated fees for packaging under EPR. Labour has wasted no time in pushing reforms of packaging waste regulations through after publishing “illustrative” base fees in August. Steel is the cheapest (at £170 to £420 per tonne, the lower and upper limits respectively), followed by paper/board (£185-£350) and then aluminium (£245-£655).
Plastic comes in at £355 to £610. Glass fees (£130 to £330) are provided separately because they were estimated using “a separate methodology to ascertain [local authority] packaging waste management costs being developed by Defra, which will be used for the final EPR for packaging fees”. Indeed, these fees are subject to change – which is why there is already a very vocal backlash, with glass industry stakeholders leading the charge.
Emma McClarkin, CEO of the British Beer and Pub Association said: “[…] these suggested fees pose a serious risk of business failure and will could [sic] lead to extra cost for the customer, strangle investment and growth which means less jobs, and lead some to make heartbreaking decisions about whether they can keep making their beer.”
McClarkin led trade bodies in writing to Defra ministers last week, explaining that, given the weight of glass, EPR fees could add between 3p and 7p to the price of 330ml glass bottles, or up to 9p on 500ml bottles. A volume rather than weight-based approach is now reportedly on the cards, with Defra seemingly open to debate with industry. Timing however is tight if the fees are to be fleshed out and finalised later this year ready for an April 2025 launch.
Don’t forget that from the second year of the scheme the fee rates will be ‘modulated’ to “ensure packaging materials that have a lower environmental impact will be the least expensive for producers to use”. Currently those fibre-based composite cups we’ve been focusing on are the most expensive at £410 to £655. If mandatory takeback works effectively you’d expect to see them fall. Maybe a charge offers a less risky approach?
