New Tax insanity will put more plastic in our environment.

Unless you help us to stop this now – please read on…

When the government creates an incentive for plastics producers to capitalise on new recycling rules at the expense of the earth’s resources, why bother investing in natural alternatives?

Having spent over four decades working in an industry where it has been all about chasing ever reducing price levels, it is great to be on the front line of public consciousness, with a mandate to deal with packaging waste and in particular plastic pollution in our environment.

Or is it?

Old habits die hard. Even the sustainability managers for big organisations frequently put lowest cost deliverables at the top of the agenda, when by their very job description, sustainability should lead the way.

I get it, the market is competitive, the retail chain needs to stay lean

Or is that really it? Could it be that what we are really fighting is well-connected big business?

The plastics industry has been 70 years in the making and has huge scale advantage over fledgling sustainable alternatives that promise a bright future because they come from nature. These alternatives might be corn or potato starch, seaweed or wood cellulose or fibre materials like sugar cane, straw and bamboo to name a few.

Is it right to expect these alternatives to compete on a level playing field on cost, when clearly the scale is just not there yet?

Well, believe it or not it gets worse.

The UK government in an effort to reduce plastic waste by incentivising woefully low plastic recycling rates intends to tax plastic packaging that does not have a 30% recycled content, including those made from sustainable non-oil-derived compostable sources.

This is ill-advised for two major reasons:

·        Firstly, the ability to track and trace recycled content in plastic material is almost non-existent, so any producer wishing to state that their product contains 30% recycled plastic is able to state it with impunity because who can disprove it?

What’s more, recycled materials are trading at significant higher cost levels above virgin raw material, and this is particularly so with the sharp drop in virgin polymer prices due to the slump in demand for oil because of  the pandemic.

That means simply there is an incentive to bend the rules and incorporate either a higher rate of virgin material or even use 100% virgin, wave a magic wand over it and call it recycled to get a huge margin increase by selling at a premium and buying at a discount.

For producers all too often squeezed to lower costs, continually HMG are putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

 

·        Secondly, compostables cannot incorporate recycled plastic because err, they are not plastic. If you could incorporate it, it would mean they can no longer be compostable which by EU definition is a form of recycling, in this case back to mother nature.

 

So, is it better to not use compostables because plastics need to be recycled? 

 

Of course not!

You only have to watch Blue Planet 2 and hear Sir David telling us what is really happening in the world to know that things have to change and in a big way, or we will all end up in a poorer environment. Recycling is a part of the answer; it is not the answer to everything.

Compostable material alternatives need to be encouraged not penalised!

For goodness sake HM Treasury! Understand that taxing the new born is going to stifle the birth rate. Do we really want to be talking about what we should have done years ago about tackling plastic packaging waste instead of taking positive leadership steps to show the rest of the world how the UK can lead in this area?

 

So, what can be done? What can you do to stop this from happening?

Please read on for a few minutes more and then if you see the logic in this idea, please:

·        sign the petition

·        share it with your world, to encourage your friends, family and respected contacts to sign, too

 

First of all, let’s suppose that instead of requiring oil-based plastics to use recycled content you taxed the virgin polymer and heavily?

What I hear the cry ‘the cost of goods will increase!’, yes, undeniably that is one effect.

And it will also mean that producers will invest in ways to reduce wastage by design. It will also encourage consumers to be aware of, and put a higher value on the plastic products they consume (just think back to the reduction in supermarket carrier bags handed out like confetti a few years back and how hundreds of millions of bags less have been used and arguably wasted since the introduction of the 5p voluntary bag tariff).

Of course, instead of taxing products that don’t have recycled content (which is a tax dodger’s dream as it is virtually impossible to tell what contains it and what doesn’t), it is much more straight forward for HMG to collect the tax at the source of original production that will then cascade down through the system.

This would mean that recycling of plastics would increase, because demand would drive consumption and use by the plastics industry on the grounds of it being good business because the cost would be comparable or hopefully less depending on the level of tax than for virgin material, economics would make it happen.

So, in short, changing the proposed plastic tax to the one we are proposing would mean;

·        Increasing the tax on virgin plastic materials by £500+ per tonne

·        Encourage good usage of more valuable resources by designing ways to save material.

·        Make it easier to ensure the tax is applied evenly and fairly by making it universal to all new virgin oil-based material.

·        At a stroke make recycled material more valuable by comparison to low cost virgin material would mean more of it being adopted as a way to lower cost.

·        Exclude the unintended consequence of taxing natural sustainable material because these fledgling industries don’t use oil-based material and what they do make is easier for nature to deal with naturally by composting.

Why am I so passionate about this? What’s in it for me and my family? Well, for 13 years my business – which is basically me - has invested almost every ounce of profit in developing one alternative to hard-to-recycle ovenable plastics. This has meant my wife’s earnings have been our primary source of income and she has been (almost!) as committed as I am to bringing this alternative to market.

When we started, we were alone. The food industry was simply not interested in natural alternatives to plastic, despite their pledges and published plans.

Now thanks to great interest from the public, a lot generated by Sir David Attenborough’s world-changing work, many businesses are pouring their hearts, energy and resources into making more use of the natural materials we find all around us. For every breakthrough, there is a reduced need to use oil-based plastics which are tough for nature to deal with.

So, yes, we have a vested interest to see the change we need in wasting valuable resources, and we are minnows compared to the established huge oil and chemical companies that want things to stay just as they are.

Did the government really propose the tax to stimulate more use of recycled materials with no clear way of policing it intentionally?

I hope not, I hope they listen to the voice of the people who support this common sense call to action.

 

·        Tax Virgin plastic, which will;

·        Reduce waste and increase recycling.

·        Stimulate sustainable new materials.

 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this. And thank you for signing the petition and for sharing it with your friends, family, business contacts and your wider world.

Kevin Clarke

CEnv., APkgPrf, FinstPkg

Sign the petition