The call was made at a parliamentary reception last week hosted by Plastics 2020, the industry umbrella group run by the British Plastics Federation (BPF), the Packaging and Films Association (PAFA) and Plastics Europe.
The plastics bodies held the event as part of their lobbying efforts to raise concerns surrounding a target of reaching a 57% recycling rate for plastic packaging that was set in last year's budget. The industry believes that the target is over-ambitious given that the rate in 2011 was just 32%.
"If we don't act we will continue to penalise the industry for overly ambitious targets", said Barry Turner of PAFA.
Key demands
Environment minister Lord de Mauley and the shadow environment minister Huw Irranca-Davies were in attendance at the event, in which representatives of the plastics sector called for Government to:
take action to bring to an end the disparate materials collection performance across the country by councils; greatly increase the landfill tax to drive recyclables away from landfill;? and ring-fence the extra revenue for investment in more recycling facilities and more energy from waste; ensure that the Quality Action Plan is followed through and has teeth; introduce incentives to reward purchasers of packaging for using more recycled content, in particular by revising the PRN system to ensure it delivers targeted funds where most needed.
In a review of the current situation, speakers at the event argued that without the infrastructure, the industry has always been in danger of failing to meet the targets.
In particular, first-quarter figures released by the Environment Agency have, industry representatives argued, emphasised how difficult it was to pursue ambitious targets with such disparate collection systems across the country and a lack of developed UK recycling and outlets for recycled materials.
Speakers argued that already, the serious dependence on export markets for recycled material has started to backfire as some have closed their markets.
Customer demand
In addition, a recent survey of PAFA members showed that despite the higher recycling targets the majority of customers were still not demanding increases in recycled content and converters were wary of including it because of the difficulty in securing consistent quality.
"To stimulate demand for recyclate we have put proposals to government to revise the PRN system," said Peter Davis of the BPF, who said some retailers have already responded favourably to this.
In addition, work done by WRG, in its annual survey of kerbside collections, still showed the amount of plastics collected by councils at the UK kerbside varies between zero and 56kg per household with a median of only 12kg.
"Clearly, given the will, it is in the power of local councils to collect more plastics for recycling and prevent this valuable resource going to landfill," said Kim Christiansen of Plastics Europe.
