Recycling failure, but packaging recovery targets are met

However, the UK did meet its overall recovery figure, which includes both recycling and recovery of materials in other ways such as energy-from-waste.

There are some uncertainties concerning how the “carry-over” fits in to these figures – the tonnage of recycling or recovery carried out in December 2003 and December 2004 which was allowed by the regulations to be put towards the next year's obligations.

Problems with the plastics sector and a slow increase in the recycling of aluminium and steel packaging from 2003 have led to UK reprocessors missing the national business recycling target by over 80,000 tonnes.

But, UK reprocessors recycled 296,492 tonnes more packaging waste overall in 2004 than the previous year, an increase that officials within Defra believe is a positive outcome. Nevertheless, missing recycling targets will make it more difficult for the UK to hit European recovery targets set by the Packaging Directive for 2008.

The UK recycled 58.2% of obligated packaging waste and recovered 64.9% of the 8,700,635 tonnes of obligated packaging. But of the total packaging waste in the waste stream (estimated by Defra to be 10,230,001 tonnes), only 49.5% was recycled and 55.2% recovered.

Not all packaging waste is obligated for recycling or recovery under the regulations, as some packaging companies are too small to meet the threshold.

Problems with fraud in the plastics reprocessing sector and difficulties increasing the collection of packaging waste from the household waste stream are thought to have led to the disappointing results.

Glass
A significant boost in glass recycling is one of the positive aspects of the latest figures, but work from British Glass suggests there is more glass packaging in the waste stream than was previously thought. This means that the new glass recycling target likely to come in from January 2006 will be higher than the existing business target for glass, making the job of the sector that much harder.

The data for the fourth quarter of 2004 was as follows:

Looking at 2004 as a whole, the table (below) shows that including domestic reprocessing and exports, all materials increased their recycling levels except for plastics. Even so, as well as the plastic sector the aluminium and steel sectors did not reprocess sufficient materials to meet the 2004 business targets.

The plastics reprocessing sector had targets set high by the government for 2004, because previous incidences of fraud had wrongly set the reprocessing figures on which the government based the 2004 targets. Even so, the decline in plastics reprocessing – reprocessing levels for plastics was down over 55,000 tonnes on last year – made the UK miss its national recycling target.

Full data for 2004 below, not including 957 tonnes of paper composted: