Defra confirms changes to producer responsibility rules

Ministers said companies dealing with leased packaging – such as pallets and crates – as well as franchise businesses will be included among those with obligations to pay for packaging recovery.

” This will spread costs more equitably among all the businesses involved and keep their individual recovery and recycling targets lower than they might otherwise be.“
– Ben Bradshaw
The amended regulations are still subject to Parliamentary approval, but should come into effect for the compliance year 2006. They also include higher UK recycling targets for packaging waste and controversial changes to the way the government enforces producer responsibility each year.

Ben Bradshaw, Local Environmental Quality Minister, said that today's measures would spread compliance costs more equitably among businesses. He said: “The new measures announced today mean that, as well as ensuring that more packaging waste is being recycled and recovered, more businesses will be involved in increasing the UK's packaging waste recycling rate.

“This will spread costs more equitably among all the businesses involved and keep their individual recovery and recycling targets lower than they might otherwise be,” he added.

Regulations
The producer responsibility regulations were originally brought in during 1997 to help the UK to meet European packaging waste recovery targets set by the Packaging Directive. The next set of EU targets are to be achieved by 2008 (see letsrecycle.com legislation section).

Under the regulations, companies above a certain threshold size that deal with a certain amount of packaging each year are obligated to pay for their share of meeting UK targets each year. They do this by purchasing packaging waste recovery notes (PRNs) from accredited reprocessors of packaging waste – or pay compliance schemes to do so on their behalf.

Simplify
Among the amendments announced today, Mr Bradshaw also confirmed that the some of the administrative and cost burden would be eased for smaller businesses following the proposal to simplify small businesses' data requirement.

Changes to alter the approval system under the producer responsibility regulations met with some anger from packaging waste compliance schemes when Defra consulted on its proposals in the summer (see letsrecycle.com story).