The government has committed to increase the recycling of packaging waste and the recyclability of packaging. The recent Resources and Waste Strategy announced that the government would improve recycling rates by ensuring a consistent set of dry recyclable materials is collected from all households and businesses and that every householder and appropriate businesses have a weekly separate food waste collection. For packaging waste, we will invoke the ‘polluter pays’ principle and extended producer responsibility for packaging, ensuring that producers pay the full net costs of managing packaging waste at end of life. Government will also ensure that local authorities are resourced to meet the new net costs arising from policies within the Resources and Waste Strategy.

This government has pledged to ensure that this will be the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than it found it. As part of this, government will introduce a world-leading new tax on plastic packaging, and reform the packaging producer responsibility system so that producers of all packaging materials are responsible for the full costs of managing waste packaging. At Budget 2018, government also announced a £20m innovation fund to tackle single-use plastics. Alongside these measures, government has committed to remove consumer single-use plastics from central government buildings by 2020. Together, these policies form part of the government’s wider strategy on tackling waste, as detailed in the Resources and Waste Strategy published in December 2018.