Make producers of littered products pay for clean-up, says ESA

Councils could save around £300 million every year if producers of the most littered products were made to pay levies towards their clean-up, says the Environmental Services Association (ESA).

According to a House of Commons report into litter and fly-tipping, around £800 million is spent every year by local government to clean parks and streets and close highways to collect litter – at a time when councils are having to firmly tighten their belts due to budgetary pressures.

While a piece of chewing gum costs only three pence to produce, each one that is littered on the pavement costs the local council £1.50 to clear up, adding up to a massive £60 million each year.

Other common types of litter are costing councils around the UK even more to tidy up: smoking material litter, which a Keep Britain Tidy survey found last year is present on 73 per cent of streets in the UK, costs councils an estimated £140 million a year, while the report says fast food, food and drinks packaging litter costs around £100 million each year.

The ESA, a trade association representing the UK’s resource and waste management industry, has produced a policy paper – ‘The Role of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in Tackling Litter in the UK’ – suggesting that ‘transferring the cost of preventing and clearing up these items from the public to the private purse’ could free up hundred of millions of pounds from council budgets.

EPR is a way of ensuring that the companies that create products take responsibility for them when they become waste by paying for the costs of dealing with them at the end of their lives.

Making producers pay

The ESA’s paper looks at each of the big three littered items to see how EPR schemes could make a difference.

Last year, as part of an inquiry into litter and fly-tipping in England by Parliament’s Communities and Local Government Committee, it was suggested that a portion of the ‘significant levies’ already imposed on the 31 billion cigarettes sold by tobacco companies to reflect smoking’s impact on health should be provided to councils to pay for the clear-up of cigarette-related litter. Instead of creating new fees for producers, the ring-fencing of existing levies could raise funds to clean up litter or run ‘large-scale’ campaigns to change behaviour.

The ESA recommends that a similar ‘placed on the market’ fee could be imposed on the producers of fast food, drinks and confectionary packaging and chewing gum, which requires specialist equipment to be removed from pavements.

In 2014, the Local Government Association estimated that three million pieces of gum, adding up to around six tonnes, are dropped in London’s West End every year.

The report posits that a levy on the annual sales of chewing gum, which total around £300 million, could be split evenly between local authorities to support clean-up, and suggests that producers could also be obligated to fund a campaign for responsible disposal of gum.

Making ‘part of the litter problem’ a big part of the solution

The government announced last December that it was working on a national litter strategy that ‘will put in place a coherent clean-up plan for England’ for the first time.

This, the ESA says, should include the role that EPR could play in tackling litter both in England and the wider UK, a point emphasised by the association’s Executive Director, Jacob Hayler: “ESA’s policy paper recommends the introduction of producer responsibility levies on the manufacturers of some of the most frequently littered items. This money would be used by local authorities to cover litter clean-up costs or to help fund anti litter campaigns”

The drive to move responsibility for tidying litter from the UK’s streets onto producers has been supported by the national Clean Up Britain campaign, which said: “Much of the litter that scars Britain’s countryside has been produced by some of our most famous brands – McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Pepsi, Walker’s Crisps, KFC, Cadbury’s, Carlsberg, Mars, Heineken, Starbucks, Imperial Tobacco, GSK, Costa Coffee, Wrigley’s chewing gum and many others.

“These are enormously successful companies and they’re a big part of the litter problem – we hope to persuade them to become a big part of the solution.”

The ESA’s policy paper on ‘The Role of Extended Producer Responsibility in Tackling Litter in the UK’ can be downloaded from its website.