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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with reference to her Department’s statistics entitled Local authority collected waste management - annual results 2021/22, published 24 March 2023, what steps her Department is taking to work with manufacturers to reduce the use of unrecyclable packaging.

The UK Government wishes to see unnecessary or excess packaging on products reduced and, where used, for the packaging to be easy to recycle. These are key objectives of our new Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging (pEPR) policy, which will be introduced across the UK from 2024. This will include measures which will require businesses that use packaging to pay fees to cover the costs of collecting and treating household packaging waste handled by local authorities. This means that – for the first time - businesses will be responsible for the cost of managing their packaging once it reaches its end of life. From 2025, the fees producers pay will also be varied (modulated) so that fees for easily recyclable packaging will be lower than those for packaging that cannot be recycled. This will place a strong financial incentive on packaging producers to reduce the overall amount of packaging they use, encourage businesses to design and use packaging that is easily recyclable, and encourage the use of reusable and refillable packaging. This will reduce the amount of unsustainable packaging that is used each year, and ensure that the packaging that is used can be recycled and the materials returned into the economy.