Why We Need Extended Producer Responsibility laws
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) simply means that the companies that make the packaging, have to pay for clean-up costs. At present, everyone from companies that make plastic juice packs to clingfilm meals to fast food meals, sell their products. Then it’s your council being used to pay to pick up all the litter.
EPR says that if you profit from selling a product, you have to deal with its afterlife too. This encourages companies to start ditching single-use plastic and get involved in projects like returnable packaging, or biodegradable packaging.
If Dominoes charge £16 for a pizza and the morning after the streets are littered with white plastic sauce pots, why are you paying for the council to pick them up (or not, it’s usually volunteers who do that).
And profits from the big pizza chain go out of the country and into the founder’s pockets. The same for people who make:
- Packaging (from crisp packets to takeaway tubs)
- Electricals (phones, chargers, small appliances)
- Batteries
- Textiles (fast fashion and hard-to-recycle blends)
- Furniture and bulky goods
Who pays for recycling company trash?
Your council (should) provide bins, and then your council is used to empty them. Some big companies who make lots of trash now forget bins entirely and just dump it all in one place.
Packaging does not get recycled if it’s made from different materials. For instance until recently, you could not recycle a Pringles packet, as it had cardboard and foil and plastic all in one time. Yet they sold billions of tubs, then expected your council tax to deal with landfilling the tubs.
EPR is ‘sharp teeth’ for single-use plastic
With EPR, money talks to the big brands. It uses fee modulation, so hard-to-recycle goods have to pay more than products sold in say cardboard. A plastic-wrapped soap brand would pay, an artisan wrapping soap in paper wouldn’t.
A few years ago, some of the supermarkets trialled those refill stations that you see in zero waste shops. Then when they decided they were not popular enough, they went back to single-use packaging.
If EPR had been in place, they likely would have kept up the trials.
What is Industry’s Response to EPR?
You can imagine. In translation, one could say ‘throwing toys out of the pram’. This is why England has dumbfoundedly delayed the upcoming deposit return scheme (where people get their money back, if they hand in used cans and bottles to vending machines).
It was full steam ahead, until England halted everything, by not agreeing to include glass, as it ‘was too difficult’. It hasn’t been difficult for Scandinavia, where some countries have been recycling glass bottles in such schemes for over 50 years.
ReThink Plastic reports that a coalition of lobbyists from the single-use packaging industry and some Italian MEPs are trying to water down laws. Yet in Rome, there are threats to kill wild boar, who are venturing into the city – due to littered trash, that they won’t help to stop.
The major supermarkets (and even McDonald’s) appear to be playing ball. All now threatened with this tax, are aiming to make all their packaging easy to recycle or compostable as soon as possible. It’s a shame it took this threat, for them to finally take the issue seriously.
To stop packaging pollution, we need a circular economy where we eliminate what we don’t need. Through EPR schemes, companies putting packaging on the market are required to pay for its collection, sorting, and recycling after use. Ellen Macarthur Foundation
