Increasing the domestic demand for recycled content in many of today’s packaging materials would reduce the quantity of waste film being exported from UK for subsequent recycling overseas. This was the view of Andrew Green, managing director of bpi.recycled products, a division of the UK’s leading PE film producer British Polythene Industries (BPI, Greenock, Scotland; www.bpipoly.com), when addressing last week’s “Replast 2012” recycling conference in London, organised by the BPF (see Plasteurope.com of 27.09.2012). Green’s comments were particularly pertinent following the recent decisions by authorities in China and Malaysia to impose much greater restrictions on the imports of plastics waste and to introduce significantly stricter controls on local recycling companies – see Plasteurope.com of 11.10.2012.

Green cited companies such as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble as being at the forefront of moves to increase the recycled content of their products. He said it was impossible to legislate against export restrictions for plastics waste and the UK must accept the principles of free trade. In his own company, Green explained how plastics had replaced other packaging materials for a range of products, but two factors to note were the growing trend to lightweighting and that some plastic products were not possible to recycle – pouches, for example, which are replacing tin and glass. This was a positive trend, he stressed, from the environmental and carbon-saving perspectives, but it did make life more difficult for a recycling industry trying to increase its volumes.

According to Green, the introduction of UK's Packaging Recovery Notes (PRNs) has not been a driver for greater recycling. The money has gone into the material, he said, and has increased costs for reprocessors. In this respect there has been an over-emphasis on recycling legislation that has focused on the collection of recyclables. The perceived benefits have not been achieved and recycling is not going as fantastically well as was anticipated.