After the waste industry warned that Britain’s processing facilities cannot meet the demands of updated legislation, implementation has been pushed back by three years. But some home nations in a better position than others.
Last week, news broke that the UK Government confirmed that councils in England have more time to prepare for new regulations forcing them to collect bread bags, crisp packets and plastic film, among other types of lightweight plastic. Initially designed to come into force next year, the policy change will now begin in April 2030, by which time an estimated 846,000 tonnes of carbon savings could be lost.
The overhauled ‘flexible plastic collections’ legislation has already been tested in 10 council areas. Extrapolating those results across the whole of England, next year alone could have seen 150,000 tonnes of packaging collected from households and processed in recycling centres. That’s if the facilities had been ready to take in such huge volumes of material. As it happens, they weren’t, with 71% of the waste winding up in energy recovery facilities — essentially incinerated to produce electricity. The remaining 29% wound up in landfill, where it is at risk of contributing to mounting heaps of trash, chemical leaching and biodiversity loss.
Mark Hall is BusinessWaste.co.uk’s Simpler Recycling expert, and says that councils were right to request the three year delay if they weren’t confident of meeting the requirements. However, pushing the roll out date back so far, without also stipulating incremental implementation, creates problems of its own. ‘Asking households to separate material, only for it to be rejected or burned, would quickly damage trust in the system. But with over three years until the 2030 deadline, the Government needs to set annual milestones for new sorting and reprocessing facilities, alongside clear information on where collected material will go to avoid further delays.
‘For this to be effective, businesses also need certainty, as recycling facilities require time and investment, which may be prevented without clear plans,’ he continues. ‘More can also happen in this time, councils that already have suitable recycling facilities shouldn’t be discouraged from introducing collections earlier, and retailers should make their take-back points easier to find and use. The packaging itself also needs improvement. Manufacturers should use the extra time to simplify designs, remove unnecessary layers and avoid using hard-to-recycle materials.’
Despite the challenges facing England, other parts of the UK are committed to pressing on with the new scheme. In Wales, for example, flexible plastic recycling with begin as planned in 2027. Scotland is also following suit by sticking to the original plan, which itself was proposed two years ago — emphasising just how long it has taken to get to this point. And how the recently announced delay sends out a worrying message about the speed at which environmental and climate-aligned policy can be amended and new rules brought into effect.
‘It is encouraging to see Wales sticking with its plans to introduce flexible plastic collections from 2027 under the Workplace Recycling regulations,’ says David Gudgeon, Head of External Affairs at international circular economy specialist, Reconomy. ‘It is clearly confident that it will have the systems needed to process flexible plastics and keep materials in use by then. Taking this approach provides councils and businesses with confidence to plan for the future, while also strengthening its already strong reputation as a world leader in recycling, ranked second globally and first in the UK.
‘Like Wales, Scotland is confident that it will have the systems needed to process flexible plastics and keep them in use by 2027. Importantly, maintaining this timetable gives local authorities, producers and recyclers the confidence to invest in the infrastructure needed to keep more flexible plastic waste in circulation and support the transition to a more circular economy. The commitment to recycling flexible plastics is also an important element of Scotland’s wider vision to become a net zero and nature positive nation by 2045,’ he continues. ‘With Wales publishing Beyond Recycling: our plan to make the circular economy in Wales a reality and Scotland setting out its ambitions through A Circular Economy Strategy for Scotland, it is essential that England does not delay any further.’
There are, of course, major differences between England, Wales and Scotland. Not least population size and density. Greater London, for example, is home to roughly the same number of people as Wales and Scotland combined. A number of other devolved mayoral regions — for example, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, West Yorkshire, and the West Midlands — also have huge public service demands. Meanwhile, local authority budgets have never been more stretched.
The ongoing standoff between Birmingham City Council and refuse companies, which last year saw rubbish piling up in the streets, casts in sharp relief how quickly a bad situation can get much, much worse when systems no longer function as they should due to the kind of disputes that would unarguably arise if legislation were brought into place without the infrastructure to back it up. Nevertheless, with so much at stake nationally and locally — including decarbonisation targets, air pollution requirements, and the need to rapidly reduce landfill use — Andy Burnham’s Labour government, and specifically Defra, must take the threat posed by these delays very seriously.
Image: Dima Solomin / Unsplash
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