Price paid for plastic packaging waste recovery notes (PRNs) rises after poor recycling figures released

Data published on the Environment Agency’s National Packaging Waste Database shows that between January and March 2012, only 1.72 million tonnes of waste was recovered or recycled by packaging waste compliance schemes compared with 1.80 million tonnes during the same period the year before (-4.4 per cent).

While paper and steel recycling rates showed increase, the provisional figures also showed plastic reprocessing rates drop by 16 cent and glass by 15 per cent in comparison to the same quarter in 2011. The report has alarmed members of the plastic industry who have seen the prices paid for plastic packaging recovery notes (PRNs) rise from around £9-10 a tonne to as much as £15, and are feeling the strain to reach the strict Budget 2012 recycling targets, outlined in March this year. Currently, the recycling target for plastic is set at 32 per cent and glass at 81 per cent, but with plastic targets set to rise by five per cent every year for the next five years (reaching up to 57 per cent by 2017) there are some that feel the targets to be unachievable. In February, the British Plastics Federation openly criticized the impending rise in recycling targets, saying that adopting them would directly cost packaging producers £70 million over the course of the five years, creating an unfair ‘tax’ on the UK packaging sector.

The alarm-raising report was issued just days before Defra announced that English recycling rates are on the up. Defra’s provisional quarterly estimates for local authority collected waste in England (released on 3 May) suggested that between the financial year 2010/11 and the rolling year October 2010 to September 2011, the tonnage of waste sent to landfill decreased by 7.6 per cent (10.5 million tonnes), household waste production decreased by 1.4 per cent (23.1 million tonnes) and household recycling increased from 41.5 per cent to 42.5 per cent.

The difference between the two reports may be due to the fact that some large reprocessors and exporters (including Mainetti UK Ltd and CK Polymers Ltd) are still to report their first quarter data to the National Packaging Waste Database, so the PRN figures may yet be revised upwards. Duncan Simpson, Director of Sales and Marketing at compliance scheme Valpak, also suggested that the National Packaging Waste Database figures start below target but pick up as the year goes on: “Over the last few years quarter one tonnage has been slow so it is too early yet to come to any conclusions.”

In 2011, plastic recycling was 19,800 tonnes out of the previous year’s figures in the first quarter, but ended almost 2,000 tonnes over target. Final estimates for 2011/12 will be published in November 2012.