It’s official – the UK is now recycling more plastic packaging than we send abroad.
As well as providing greater volumes of material for UK manufacturing, domestic reprocessing makes it easier to guarantee robust data trails. For local authorities, it may also represent an increase in income.
Although UK plastic packaging recycling has risen steadily since 2016, 2021 saw a significant jump, which led to the UK market outstripping exports to deal with over 53 per cent of waste plastics throughout the year.
Under our market-led PRN system, prices rise and fall. At the start of this year, plastic PRNs were trading at £50 per tonne, but in just seven months they have reached £250 per tonne. At the same time, last year saw a leap of 100,000 tonnes in domestic reprocessing, from 486,000 tonnes to 590,000 tonnes.
As the market changes, plastics are moving from a material that needed a home, to one that is sought after. For local authorities with value-share agreements in place, this is good news. Often, as PRN prices rise, the value of the material goes up. As crucial players in the collection of waste plastics, councils need to ensure that they are claiming their full share of the extra funds that packaging producers place into the system.
In recent years, we have also seen the advent of new UK legislation for plastic packaging waste, a wider focus on the potential issues around plastic waste exports, and ongoing logistical challenges caused by the pandemic.
However, while these have played their part, it was the loss of end markets such as China, combined with 2019’s increase in the UK packaging recycling target, that created the largest splash. Amid fear that the UK would not meet its obligation, plastics PRNs were in greater demand and, as a result, prices increased.
The rise led to higher levels of recycling at home and abroad, but also raised the spectre of potential fraud. Exporters have proved more likely to fall foul of enforcement agencies and, as a result, the market is opting for UK suppliers that will not let them down.
Valpak has always favoured UK reprocessing. In 2021, 70 per cent of our plastics PRNs were sourced from UK businesses, compared with a UK figure of 53 per cent, and we welcome the investment in domestic reprocessing that comes with PRN funding.
With a portion of the PRN funding going to reprocessors to invest in infrastructure, this is good news for UK industry. Unlike exporters, which tend to generate PRNs on most, if not all, material exported, UK recyclers write evidence at the end of the process, after contamination has been removed and any small amounts have been lost during the recycling process. This makes the UK system more robust, as UK PRNs are based on genuine material, and provide the UK supply chain with valuable investment.
