Recommendation 18

HM Government Deferred

We welcome the Committee’s comments. The government is committed to making the UK a world leader in tackling plastic waste and we want to transform how we deal with waste and resources. We are committed to supporting investment in UK infrastructure to ensure we can manage our waste more sustainably. We are developing a ‘Waste Infrastructure Roadmap’ to help support the delivery of our waste management ambitions. We intend to publish the ‘Waste Infrastructure Roadmap’ in 2023. This will use high level data and information to support investment decisions across the waste management sector. The ‘Waste Infrastructure Roadmap’ will present tonnages of waste arisings and current infrastructure capacity in the UK (to 2035) for key waste streams including plastics, glass, paper and card, metals, and food. It is intended to enable and support local authorities and businesses when making investment decisions, including where investment is needed to meet future capacity gaps. The ‘Waste Infrastructure Roadmap’ will not detail where or how investment should be made and is meant to be a tool to support investors and local authorities in decision making. It would be an inappropriate use of public funds to base investment decisions solely on this high-level indicative analysis. Those looking to invest in waste management infrastructure are encouraged to engage with the UK Infrastructure Bank. pEPR will transfer the costs of dealing with packaging waste generated by households from local taxpayers and councils to the packaging producers (applying the ‘polluter-pays principle’). The fees producers pay (estimated to be of the order of £1.2bn per year) will support the delivery of efficient and effective services for the collection and management of packaging waste from households. This will mean more packaging materials being collected for recycling, for example, plastic film and flexible packaging and more and better-quality materials for recycling. This in turn will give confidence to businesses to invest in recycling processes and end markets. Similarly, the government’s proposals for a deposit return scheme for plastic drinks bottles and metal drinks cans will provide high quality material for recycling and help boost investment in reprocessing. Industry has consistently told the government that clarity of policy proposals on packaging and waste collection and recycling is key to providing the confidence industry needs to invest. This is what the government’s proposals for pEPR, DRS for drinks containers and consistency in business and household recycling are intended to achieve. As the Committee has noted, the PRN system will continue in the short term and will continue to support investment in reprocessing infrastructure. These policies, alongside fiscal measures including the Plastic Packaging Tax, Landfill Tax and the potential expansion of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme (UK ETS5) to cover Energy from Waste aim to work together to push waste up the waste hierarchy. The government is confident this package will encourage greater levels of recycling and create the market conditions to support continued investment in domestic recycling capacity.