Defra cancel mandatory cup take back
In their Resource and Waste newsletter, released on 13 December, Defra provided detail on their decision to cancel plans for mandatory cup take back.
Originally, the scheme aimed to ensure businesses over a certain size provided separate waste collection of single-use cups from consumers, such as fibre-based composite coffee cups, in turn ensuring they are sent directly for recycling.
Why has the scheme been cancelled?
The decision to withdraw the policy, according to the announcement, was threefold. Firstly, the net cost of the scheme was estimated to be around £52 million for both industry and government. Therefore, the projected benefits of the scheme, around four million tonnes of CO2 in greenhouse gas savings, were not thought to justify this expenditure.
Finally, takeback would ‘have limited impact on the environmental objectives, estimated to reduce littering of cups by two percentage points and increase the recycling rate…by only seven percentage points in 10 years’.
What does this mean for businesses?
This is not to say businesses should be discouraged from offering takeback services of single-use cups, alongside other hard to recycle packaging items. Any packaging classified as ‘household packaging’, that is not commonly collected by local authorities for recycling or is reusable packaging, once collected can be reported by producers with their EPR submissions.
The weight of collected items will be netted off their waste management fees, providing a clear incentive to businesses to manage voluntary systems.
“While the new UK government has taken forward many policies outlined by the previous administration, the coffee cup takeback scheme simply didn’t tick all the requisite boxes. It would indeed have been a cost to business, but – perhaps more pertinently – it would also have been a time drain on civil servants who could instead spend their time on bigger prizes with better environmental outcomes. The change of heart serves to highlight the finite nature of human resources when it comes to creating new legislation and schemes.”
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