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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for what reason a refillable glass bottle scheme was not included in her Department’s Waste Prevention Programme for England published July 2023.

We want to encourage a shift away from hard to recycle and single-use products and packaging, and support research and innovation into more sustainable alternatives and systems, reducing litter and plastic pollution as well as conserving material resources.

The introduction of Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging, as part of the Collection and Packaging reforms, will move the full cost of dealing with packaging waste generated by households from local taxpayers and councils to businesses that handle and use packaging (applying the ‘polluter-pays principle’). This will encourage businesses to think carefully about how much packaging they use, and to design and use packaging that is easily recyclable. It will also encourage use of refillable and reusable packaging.

Refill systems will have a significant role to play in driving down unnecessary waste, and we are working to identify measures that could be used to encourage greater use of refillable and reuseable packaging. We remain committed to introducing refill/reuse obligations and will bring forward our proposals with the intention of introducing these in 2025.