Select committee: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Recommendation 26
Third Report - The price of plastic: ending the toll of plastic waste
Published 7 Nov 2022
Paragraph 124
Addressed to Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Plastic waste All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
Exporting waste will always be vulnerable to crime and while the UK must strengthen enforcement efforts, not every bad batch of exported waste will be caught. Many stakeholders have called on the UK to work towards a ban on all plastic waste exports. Waste management sector representatives believe this could be achievable in only a few years. We believe that a requirement to process all waste domestically will provide a strong market signal to secure investment in domestic recycling infrastructure and support efforts to reduce and reuse more plastics. We recommend a ban on all exports of UK plastic waste by the end of 2027. The Government should publish a roadmap to achieve this by March 2023, setting out milestones towards this target (such as preliminary bans on unsorted or unprocessed waste plastics), as well as a plan for increasing UK domestic reprocessing capacity.
From: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Third Report - The price of plastic: ending the toll of plastic waste (HC 22), paragraph 124, 7 November 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 27 January 2023 (deadline 7 January 2023).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with the Committee on the importance of the waste hierarchy and on reuse, but disagrees with several recommendations, including dropping the qualifier "avoidable" from the 2042 plastic waste target and a ban on all plastic waste exports.
- It agrees that more use of reusable packaging is desirable and intends to "come forward with our proposals in 2024" on measures such as targets, obligations and whether there is a role for modulating fees.
- It disagrees with an exit strategy for the Packaging Waste Recovery Note system within a year of EPR starting, because it wants "to make sure we put the right measures in place at the right time".
- It disagrees with modulating the Plastic Packaging Tax, saying the 30% recycled content threshold is "ambitious", and keeps the rate and threshold "under review". Changes are a matter for Treasury Ministers.
- It disagrees with a ban on all plastic waste exports, expecting "legitimate exports to continue", and has committed to banning exports of plastic waste to non-OECD countries.