Steve Morgan presents RECOUP’s activities on the UK Plastics Packaging Tax

This week, Steve Morgan presented at the UK Circular Plastics Packaging 2024 event in Manchester on the activities of RECOUP’s UK Plastics Packaging Tax working group looking at opportunities to make the tax a more effective policy to drive use of recycled content. The presentation can be found here, with a summary of the areas of consideration at the end of presentation.

Steve also took part in panel debate titled ‘New Reforms in UK EPR – Are we Ready or not?’ with Helen Bird from WRAP, Alice Harlock from OPRL and chaired by Emma Wilkinson from Beyondly.

A joint event, UK Circular Plastics Packaging 2024 being held alongside the second Biodegradeable & Compostable Plastics conference, it was a technical forum which presentations from numerous RECOUP and key stakeholders including Food Standards Agency (FSA), Fera Science, WRAP, OPRL, The Co-Operative Group, Nextek, Berry Global, WRAP, OPRL, The University of Manchester, Beyondly, Ecosurety, Impact Recycling, and ReVentas, among others.

The key take aways from the event centred around the ever increasing technological, process and other considerations and developments in material reprocessing and the complexities and need for food contact approval in making safe packaging. This covered:

• Latest UK Food Contact regulations in respect of plastic and bio-based materials and articles.
• The social and material barriers to qualifying and quantifying recycled content.
• Mechanically recycled food grade rPP at scale.
• Purification recycling of post-consumer flexible films.
• Reaching 100% recyclable packaging.

If you would like to find out more about RECOUP’s activities on the UK Plastic Packaging Tax, please contact Steve (steve.morgan@recoup.org).