A tense stand-off emerged at the Valpak reprocessors' conference on Friday as both domestic reprocessors and exporters objected to the Environment Agency's interpretation of new accreditation rules brought in this year.
The rules in question concerned the cut-off date for reprocessors to apply for accreditation. Under regulations that came into force in January 2004, if reprocessors want to issue packaging waste reprocessing notes (PRNs) next year, they have to apply for accreditation with the Environment Agency by September 30.
Under the UK packaging waste regulations, packaging producers must pay for their share of the reprocessing of packaging waste to meet UK targets. The producers pay for their responsibility through the purchase of notes that reprocessors issue for the tonnage of recycling they carry out.
At the Valpak reprocessors' conference in the National Space Centre in Leicester, reprocessors warned that as it stands, the Environment Agency will not allow new applications or changes to existing applications for accreditation “as and when” as had previously been the case. New or expanding reprocessors bringing new sites online after the September deadline would therefore have to wait until the following year to accredit the new sites.
One reprocessor said: “We might receive planning permission in March, for example, but the Environment Agency is saying you might as well not start until January of the next year.”
Freeze
Another reprocessor warned: “We seem to be in the situation where there will be a freeze in UK capacity next year – only existing business will be able to provide growth.”
Compliance scheme Valpak warned that if this ruling was allowed to stand, it would stifle much-needed growth in packaging waste recovery, and threaten the UK's position in meeting European recovery and recycling targets in 2008.
Steve Gough, chief executive at Valpak, said: “We need to work together to get round this. The UK is really going to struggle with the targets in future years if not – we need to have new reprocessing as and when.”
Naive
John May of the steel reprocessor Corus, who also sits on the government's Advisory Committee on Packaging (ACP), said: “The ACP didn't recommend that the system should be quite so inflexible. It is unnecessarily nave to believe that business works this way. There is a lot of work to do on this before 2008, and we cannot work in this step way.”
The Environment Agency's Chris Grove argued that since the September 30 date was in the regulations, it was not a matter of the Agency's interpretation. Mr Grove said that as it stood, the Agency could not claim the necessary fee to process accreditations that were not sent in before the September 30 deadline.
Mr Grove said: “We can't introduce a fee. We can't change the regulations – we can only work with what we have got. We can't vary the accreditation because we have accredited you on the information you provided.”
Mechanism
But John Gummer, the chairman of compliance scheme Valpak – argued that there was nothing in the regulations to stop the Environment Agency accepting changed or new applications “as and when”.
He said: “There must be a mechanism for bona fide people to provide information for new infrastructure. You can't have a system where no installations can open except before September each year.”
Officials from Defra have said they will meet with the Environment Agency and representatives of the packaging waste sector to negotiate a way forward in the coming weeks. A consultation on possible changes to the regulations is expected next year, but any proposed changes would not come into affect before 2006. Officials believe that even if urgent legislation changes were fast-tracked through the system, it would still take a minimum of six months for the changes to come into force.
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