Supporting the plastics sector

Plastic is an excellent material for packaging, which protects the products we buy and keeps our food fresh. It is light, durable and versatile. However, households throw away around 1.5 million tonnes of plastic packaging each year. This is a loss to the economy and the environment.

So Im pleased to see plastics recycling hitting the headlines a lot recently. With new recycling targets announced in Aprils Budget, the drive to recycle more plastics has never been stronger. From consumers who want to recycle more types of plastic, through to manufacturers, brands and retailers who want to use recycled polymers in new packaging, there is significant appetite to boost the UKs reprocessing capacity for these materials.

Bottles

Weve already seen huge growth in plastic bottle recycling. Only 12,000 tonnes of plastic bottles were collected for recycling back in 2000 its now nearly 20 times that amount. Infrastructure to process this material is growing rapidly in response. Protecting the quality of this valuable material stream is important, which is why we launched plastic bottle collections guidance earlier this year. While plastic bottle reprocessing infrastructure is a young industry, it is still much further ahead than what we have in the UK to process pots, tubs and trays or rigid plastics.

Thats why it was great to be at the opening of the extension to the ECO Plastics facility at Hemswell last month. The plant will now process 150,000 tonnes of plastic packaging per year including 15,000 tonnes of mixed plastics. Developments like this show the progress we have made in plastics recycling just a decade ago, much of this material would have been landfilled, and its value lost. As Lord Taylor said at the launch we need to see more facilities to sort and process mixed plastic opening. WRAP has set up a 5m Mixed Plastics Loan Fund to support this growth. If youre working in this area and looking for help with funding please do get in touch.

Rigids

Local authorities are rightly responding to growing demand to recycle more types of plastic. While most collect plastic bottles (90%), increasingly we are seeing councils add rigid plastics to their collections, with 36% now doing so. However its essential that the increase in collections does not overtake the infrastructure for rigid plastics. Otherwise it has the potential to contaminate the plastic bottle stream. Protecting this valuable stream is a top priority, as I said earlier.

We recently launched guidance for local authorities who want to add rigid plastics to their plastic bottle collections, where there is infrastructure in place. Plastic bottle recycling is also one of the themes of this years Recycle Week. So this is an ideal time to work with residents to help boost quality.

Alongside increasing collections and capacity, there is also lots going on behind the scenes to ensure that we can recycle more types of plastic than is currently possible. For example, recycling plastics into new food packaging presents a number of challenges largely due to the fact that it must have been food-grade packaging previously.

Progress

While there are established processes for recycling HDPE and PET into food-grade plastic, this is not currently possible for polypropylene (PP). So WRAP is conducting a number of trials in this area. Preliminary findings suggest that it is possible to auto-sort food PP packaging from other non-food PP packaging, and we expect to publish full results in the summer.

Were only part-way through a complex journey. But the industry is making great strides and I think were well-placed to meet the 2017 target.