Kong to fund environmental projects after breaching packaging regulations

Dog toy company Kong has made an enforcement undertaking of almost £5,000 to environmental projects after being found by the Environment Agency (EA) to have breached packaging waste regulations.

The company committed three offences under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007 in the years 2012-15.

These included failing to register and take reasonable steps to recover and recycle waste packaging, and failing to submit certificates of compliance to the appropriate agency, resulting in an enforcement undertaking by the EA.

Tessa Bowering, Senior Environment Officer at the EA, explained: "Enforcement undertakings are a type of civil sanction that allow us to secure regulatory compliance from organisations. They also ensure businesses don’t profit from non-compliance and provide an opportunity for them to react responsibly to any offending.

A spokesman for Kong said: "We are now fully compliant and wouldn’t have contravened the regulations had we been aware of our obligations at the time."

The Salisbury-based company has been instructed by the EA to donate to a charity also based in Salisbury, The Species Recovery Trust.

The money will fund three of the charity’s projects: the Salisbury Drinking Fountain Campaign, which aims to reduce the number of single-use plastic water bottles purchased in the city centre; and two that aim to improve the habitats of endangered plants heath lobelia and marsh clubmoss.

Bowering continued: "The Species Recovery Trust is an appropriate recipient of this payment because the project they are funding looks to reduce the amount of plastic packaging waste through the reduction of single use plastic bottles."

Producer Responsibility Obligations: what do businesses need to do to comply?

If a business has a turnover of more than £2 million, is based in the UK, and produces, uses or sells more than 50 tonnes of packaging products a year, it needs to report its packaging use.

This involves either registering on the appropriate National Packaging Waste database by 7 April every year, or joining an approved compliance scheme, which transfers responsibility to the scheme operator to provide evidence of packaging recycling in the form of packaging recovery notes (PRNs).

Different materials have different recycling targets. There are online calculators to work out how much of each material a business should be recycling.

Read more about the Producer Responsibility Obligations regulations and how to comply on the GWP Group Quick Guide.