British plastics group seeks scrap export disincentive

The Recycling Group of the British Plastics Federation (BPF) has launched a new manifesto urging changes to the United Kingdom’s PRN/PERN (Packaging Recovery Note/ Packaging Export Recovery Note) system for plastics.

The BPF says it represents the whole plastics supply chain including polymer producers, distributors, additives suppliers, machinery manufacturers, processors and recyclers.

BPF says its manifesto sets out arguments to enable the plastics recycling sector to meet the government’s low carbon manufacturing ambitions, which are central to meeting the goals of a circular economy and resource efficiency. In the manifesto, the BPF proposes a series of policies that focus on driving the use of increased volumes of recycled plastics in U.K. manufacturing.

The BPF’s flagship policy reform is a split on the plastics packaging recycling targets to distinguish recycling in the local market (U.K. and EU) from what is exported outside Europe. The proposal is for this to be achieved through the existing PRN/PERN mechanism, such that there is a progressive weighting toward increased local recycling year on year.

The manifesto comes at a time when the EU is calling for a review of its waste strategy through to 2030 and proposing landfill bans and substantially higher recycling targets for municipal waste and packaging materials.

Roger Baynham, chairman of BPF’s Recycling Group , says, “The proposals contained in this manifesto are designed not only to provide a route map to deliver the best environmental outcomes from plastic [scrap], but also to create new low-carbon manufacturing jobs in the vanguard of the circular economy.”

Baynham says the BPF policy will “encourage investment in recycling infrastructure and innovation to develop new markets and applications for recycled plastics.”