Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the amount of fresh food sold in the UK (a) with and (b) without plastic packaging.

We do not collect data on the specific packaging used for certain product types.

We estimate that in total roughly 2.3m tonnes of plastic packaging was placed on the market in 2019.

We are currently developing Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging. Through this, we want to encourage producers to move to more recyclable packaging, where this is appropriate and practicable. EPR for packaging will see producers paying for the waste management costs associated with the packaging that they place on the market. In using more easily recyclable packaging, producers will pay less. Costs will be modulated (varied) to take account of various criteria, such as recyclability.