Litter: Tobacco

(asked on 11th February 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she has made an assessment of the potential (a) merits of the EU proposal to introduce a producer responsibility scheme for the tobacco industry on litter and (b) effect on environmental protection of not introducing that scheme in the UK.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 19th February 2020

The Government has made no specific recent assessment of the UK tobacco industry’s contribution to tackling smoking-related litter. We would like to see the tobacco industry delivering on the commitment given by the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association to tackle the litter created by its products and their users, but this must be achieved without breaching the UK’s international obligations.

Tobacco packaging is covered by the current Producer Responsibility Regulations, which require companies to recycle a proportion of the packaging waste they place on the market. Our forthcoming Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme for packaging, including relevant tobacco packaging, will require producers to cover the full net costs of managing packaging at its end of life, including litter. This will be introduced in 2023.

In the Resources and Waste Strategy (RWS), we committed to looking into and consulting on EPR for five new waste-streams by 2025, and consulting on two of these by 2022. We have currently identified our five priority waste-streams as: textiles, fishing gear, certain products in construction and demolition, bulky waste and vehicle tyres. This list is not fixed and does not exclude the potential to review and consult on EPR for other waste streams if these are identified as being of equal or higher priority.

The EU’s Single-Use Plastics Directive includes measures to implement an EPR scheme for tobacco products with filters, and filters marketed for use in combination with tobacco products, which should cover the costs of awareness raising, data gathering and litter clean-up of these products.

Now that the UK has left the EU, the Government will use this opportunity to refresh and renew our environmental policy. In the RWS, we committed to meeting or exceeding the ambition of the EU Directive, and we will do this in a way that works best for the UK’s aspirations in this policy area.

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