Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to increase the proportion of plastics consumed in the UK which are (a) manufactured in the UK and (b) recyclable in the UK.

The billions we are investing in R&D, skills and support for digital technology adoption through initiatives like Made Smarter and Help to Grow is providing a competitive business environment for British manufacturers. It is attracting new investment, developing new export opportunities, and securing new high-value jobs in our industrial heartlands.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funds a variety of projects related to plastics including projects improving sustainability and recyclability of plastics in the UK. For example, the Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge, with £60m of funding from UKRI through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and matched by £149m from industry, is supporting academic-led research to address known problems and to support industry-led collaborative research and development of new technologies, de-risking innovative plastics sustainability projects, and delivering over 230kt per annum of additional recycling capacity. The output of this capacity is intended to be used back in packaging and will make a real contribution to the gap of recycled plastics in the UK.

The introduction of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Packaging will see businesses that place packaging on the market bear responsibility for the costs of managing that packaging once it becomes waste. It will incentivise businesses to design and use packaging that is easier to recycle, and to increase the recycling of packaging waste.

Finally, The UK Plastic Packaging Tax will be introduced from 1 April 2022 to encourage the use of recycled plastic in packaging, and in turn stimulate increased levels of recycling and collection of plastic waste, diverting it away from landfill or incineration. It is estimated that this will lead to an increase in the use of recycled plastic by 40% in 2022-23.