Packaging Manufacturers: Extended Producer Responsibility

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 4:48 pm on 1 July 2026.

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Photo of Mary Creagh Mary Creagh The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 4:48, 1 July 2026

Obviously, I do not sit there and do the maths with people. These suggestions and potential solutions have to be modelled and worked through. We are working at pace to assess whether any targeted short-term measures could be introduced through the forthcoming PEPR amending statutory instrument to partially address the dual-use packaging issue. So we are working on a short-term solution, but we are also working on a longer-term solution, which is the Austrian model that I mentioned. Again, the hon. Gentleman may have been distracted by the whistle when I mentioned that.

Councils across the country are rebranding and upgrading their glass recycling points to make it easier for households to use glass recycling facilities and to reduce the contamination that we know is so important to avoid in glassmaking. We have made a £5.3 million investment in that over a couple of years, and those changes are happening on the ground.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham said, reuse is not a short-term fix. It was once the norm when a lot of us—perhaps not all hon. Members present in the Chamber—were growing up, and it can be again. In some ways the future looks like the past—let us hope that is not the case for the England game. PEPR creates a powerful financial incentive for glass producers to move to reuse. Running reuse schemes means producers avoid most PEPR fee obligations, and glass, as we have heard, is a durable, tried and tested technology.

While it requires up-front investment and system change, it shifts costs away from single-use production and disposal, it improves supply chain resilience and reduces costs over time. Reuse is already operating at scale internationally, particularly for glass. Reusing a glass bottle just five times can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by more than a third. The more times they are reused, the greater the benefits will be.

As we have heard today, the issue is not just about the environment; it is also about jobs, communities and the long-term health of British industry. The industry estimates that these reforms will create 25,000 jobs and underpin £10 billion of investment in new sorting and processing facilities. The reforms will drive that improvement in our recycling rate and, crucially, they will reduce our carbon emissions.

In conclusion, glass matters, industry matters and glassworkers matter. This Government back businesses and workers, and we back the transition to a circular economy that makes the country stronger, cleaner and more resilient. Change is coming to EPR and I reassure all hon. Members that we want to have a predictable, well set out framework within which business can confidently operate and householders can confidently know that what they put in their recycling streams is going to have a second, and hopefully third and fourth, life.

Question put and agreed to.

House adjourned.