Recycling in the UK
This content was first posted in another forum in April 2020 by John Baxter, Subject Adviser.
I’ve been trying to understand how recycling works in the UK – follow the money around the system. Having done this I thought I might as well write it down.
Regulation
It all starts with the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations. These require producers of packaging to contribute to the cost of recycling it. These producers are known as obligated institutions (OIs). There are four types of OI:
- Raw material manufacturers
- Converters
- Packers and fillers
- Sellers.
Companies who import packaging or packaged goods may also be obligated. Not every company is obligated: there are criteria on turnover etc.
Take as an example plastic milk bottles:
- PlasCo makes HDPE which it sells to BottleCo to make bottles
- BottleCo sells bottles to Dairy
- Dairy fills the bottles and sells them to Supermarket
- Supermarket sells the milk to consumers (that's us).
Not much recycling so far: each company in the chain loses interest when the product reaches its factory gate. But:
- Consumers recycle the bottle and it is collected by WasteCo who are contracted to Council
- WasteCo bales up the HDPE bottles. Some are exported, and some are sold to BinCo
- BinCo makes wheeliebins using the recycled material.
(There may be an intermediate step between WasteCo and BinCo, somebody who processes the material into pellets. Some of the pellets may go back to BottleCo.).
So how do PlasCo, BottleCo, Dairy and Supermarket meet their obligations under the regulations?
WasteCo and BinCo have both registered as accredited recyclers: so for each tonne of material that WasteCo exports it can create a document called a Packaging Export Recovery Note (PERN). For each tonne of material that BinCo uses it can create a Packaging Recovery Note (PRN). PERNs and PRNs can be traded on an exchange such as The Environment Exchange. (Other exchanges are available.) Plasco, BottleCo, and Supermarket go to these exchanges and buy PERNs and PRNs to present to government to show that they have done what they are required to do (even though they may not have done anything).
So does the system work? Well, it seems to: 85% of plastic milk bottles are currently recycled, the recycled content of new bottles is around 31% and the target for 2020 is 50%. Money flows from the OIs to waste management companies and recyclers. It seems to me though that nobody except BinCo has any real incentive to drive the recycling rate up. BinCo has an incentive to use recovered HDPE rather than virgin raw material (which may be cheaper) because only then can it generate PRNs. (It also helps that many of its customers – such as Council – have buy recycled policies).
Council of course also has recycling targets, but it is measured by weight of material recycled so it’s not really interested in plastic bottles, it wants glass and steel and newspapers. WasteCo likes to see HDPE in the recycling stream however because at least there is a market for it.
So that’s how it works (I think).
Milk bottle tops
These are polypropylene and they are recyclable. The last time I checked you could get £25/tonne, and the recyclers wouldn’t collect a batch less than three tonnes. I haven’t worked out how many bottle tops that is, but it’s a lot. You'll need a big bin.
As a footnote, you may have noticed that over recent years plastic milk bottle tops have got paler. This is because WasteCo minces the bottles (many with tops on) and then separate the white and coloured material using machines. They like to run the machines at full speed but then the error rate goes up: so the recyclers go back to Supermarket and say “would the customers buy milk if the bottles were a bit greenish?” (most milk sold in UK is semi-skimmed) and Supermarket said ”no”. Then the recyclers said “how about white tops on the bottles?” and Supermarket said “no”. So BottleCo makes very pale tops and WasteCo is happy.
Plastic bottle vs glass
Glass bottles win out over plastic once they've done 12 or 15 trips. As the recycling rate for HDPE improves this number will presumably increase.
Sources and disclaimer
Much of this is from Wikipedia (so it must be true). Stats on recycling come from The Dairy Roadmap. Once I put it down I couldn’t pick it up again. The thing about bottle tops came from Evan Davis’s programme on Radio 4. 12 or 15 trips for a glass bottle is something I read somewhere, I can't remember where.