Government holds summit on reducing packaging

Sixteenstakeholders were brought togetherat a’Summit on Reducing Packaging’ at DCLGs offices in London to discuss what the barriers to increasing recycling are and what can be done to address them.

Grocery packaging was cut by more than 220,000 tonnes last year, and packaging recyclingreached an all-time high of 60% in 2009. But, packaging waste rose between 2001 and 2009 to 10.8 million tonnes. This is about 10% of all commercial and industrial waste and about 20% of all household waste.

With the festive season approaching, councils are expected to deal with around 1.7m tonnes of household waste, so the governmentwants all those who make, sell and manage disposal of packaging to “stamp out”this issue for future years.

DCLG

The meeting was chaired by local government minister Grant Shapps and recycling minister Lord Taylor. The involvement of DCLG in Defras waste portfolio has been seen by some as evidence of its increasing interest in the popularist side of waste policy and its influence over Defra.

Speaking at the meeting, Mr Shapps said: Christmas should always be a time for sharing and celebrating but we must remember that every trussed up turkey, shrink-wrapped sprout and over-packaged pudding adds to the bin burden in the new year.

Every council can do their bit to ensure residents know their local recycling scheme, but we also need to help households by being Scrooge-like with the amount of packaging used. Taxpayers can prevent their public pounds going straight to landfill by insisting on less packaging and recycling whenever possible.

Lord Taylor said: After the presents are unwrapped and the turkey is eaten, the last thing anyone feels like doing is talking about what can and cant be recycled, which can be different from town to town. We want to bring an end to this recycling lottery where people need to spend time and effort at Christmas trying to do the right thing.

Its not good enough to keep making and selling packaging thats destined for landfill its bad for business, consumers and the environment.

Meeting

At the meeting, retailers said they would like to give more information about recycling services to their customers but were prevented from doing so because household recycling services are not standardised and can vary hugely depending on where their customers live.

For their part, local authorities said their services were not standardised due to the nature of being tied into long-term contracts and difficulties with providing the same services in different parts of the country. But, they pointed to the SE7 group of councils in the South East (see letsrecycle.com story) as a possible example of how councils could work on a regional basis towards providing common recycling services as one way in which more uniformity could be achieved.

And, they urged retailers to stop making packaging which is hard to recycle such as that made of composite materials or anumber of different polymers and said that lightweight packaging was not necessarily helpful if the resultant packaging was harder to recycle.

Narrowing

It was generally agreed that a narrowing down in the number of different local authority recycling collection schemes in operation would be a good thing, while it was noted that a lot of work on technical innovations was already being carried out by bodies such as the Advisory Committee on Packaging (ACP) and Packaging Recycling Action Group (PRAG).

The summit was attended by representatives from: The British Retail Consortium; B&Q; Morrisons; Tesco: Sainsburys; Local Government Association; East Northamptonshire council; Bournemouth borough council; Hackney council; Kent county council; Alupro; WRAP; ESA: Advisory Committee on Packaging: INCPEN and the Federation of Small Businesses.