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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the amount of plastic used in packaging.

Through powers being taken in the Environment Bill, the Government intends to introduce Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for packaging. These measures will place the cost of managing packaging waste on those businesses that place packaged goods on the UK market.

In doing so we will incentivise businesses to think carefully about how they can reduce the packaging they use, design and use packaging that is easily recyclable, and encourage more use of reusable and refillable packaging.

For plastic that is used in packaging, we want more of it to be recycled. Producers will be required to meet higher plastic packaging recycling targets and through our measures that we are consulting on currently for more consistent recycling collections in England, all households and businesses will be able to recycle rigid plastic packaging. We are also consulting on the inclusion of plastic film and flexible plastic packaging in the core set of materials for collection in England.