Retailers say that forcing them to take on recycling costs will increase household bills in the U.K. by £140 a year. The Telegraph has more.
Green levies due to be imposed from next year will increase food prices within months, pushing up total shopping bills by up to £4 billion a year, retailers have warned, as senior Tories urged Rishi Sunak to drop the “nonsensical” plans.
In an open letter to the Telegraph, the British Retail Consortium suggests that a scheme to charge retailers and manufacturers for the cost of councils recycling their packaging will increase the cost of household goods when it is rolled out from April next year.
The levy was devised by Michael Gove during his time as Environment Secretary and billed as helping the U.K. to reduce waste and meet its Net Zero target, alongside a separate scheme to introduce a returnable deposit system for the purchase of drinks bottles and cans.
Taken together, the schemes could increase household shopping bills by up to £140 per year, based on the consortium’s estimate of an overall £4 billion cost.
Officials say the funds raised from retailers will go towards the operation and improvement of local council recycling services, with the fees acting as an incentive for firms to use less packaging.
But the Government’s official impact assessments of the two schemes – seen by the Telegraph – acknowledge that the entire cost due to fall on retailers could simply be passed on to consumers. The scheme – formally called the Extended Producer Responsibility – would “most likely” increase household bills by £40 a year, or up to £48, according to an official assessment produced in February 2022, before soaring inflation that will have increased those figures even further.
The separate “deposit return scheme” for bottles and cans will add up to 4p to the cost of bottled drinks from next year, a separate impact assessment stated. It is intended to incentivise consumers to recycle containers, through a system of returnable cash deposits. The future of an equivalent scheme in Scotland is in doubt over the Westminster Government’s refusal to allow Holyrood to include glass bottles in the scheme.
Worth reading in full.
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Why should they think a deposit return scheme is something new? We had it in the seventies and it worked well! A lot more cost effective and environmentally friendly to return a bottle, wash it and refill it!
Sooner than collect bottles, melt them down and make them into bottles again?
The seventies milk bottle was used on avg 15 times before replacement, on average that is!
And we bought loose tea in paper bags along with lard and butter in grease proof paper
Barrs continued until 2015 and that was 30p per bottle.
So does that mean it was worth their while sooner than replace bottles with every sale? How come its been possible up to now, but now, we get to bare the cost?
I think it’s more to do with a lack of effort and inconvenience to the retailer than any costs induced!
The economics changed when they decided to reduce the size of the bottles regularly and they couldn’t be reused.
It could be that it was worth their while provided the quantity of returns was high enough. Now that it is being pushed as policy, manufacturers can claim it is a cost being forced on them and hope no-one can remember the world of last year let alone 8+ years ago.
They think it’s new because they’re so obsessed with the present that even the relatively recent past is a foreign country. I’m only 48 and well remember getting money back on empty bottles.
My first job working at a pub, when I was 16 in the early 1990s, was ‘bottling up’. That meant starting the morning clearing the the bar of all the leftover bottles. I had a big, heavy, sticky bin full of bottles and cans that I had to sort through. Cans all got put together for recycling and Schweppes and Britvic bottles, along with Courage Light Ale and Courage Brown Ale always got recycled. It’s only relatively recently that everything got chucked. Not so long ago we could still take our empty bottles to the car park in our local Tesco to chuck all out glass bottles, newspapers and cans in recycling skips. Abruptly couple of years ago, all the recycling skips were removed and we have to chuck our bottles, cans and newspapers in our green wheelie bins at home.
As ever, the state makes something ordinary sound extraordinary and makes us pay extra for it!
This was 15 years ago and things might of changed since then, but when I was part of an overland trip across Africa and we wanted to buy a crate of bottled beer or soft drinks bars and shops would only sell it to us if we gave them an equivalent number of empty bottles. Presumably this was because they had to send back empty bottles before they could buy more stock and the bottles were washed and reused. This has to be less energy intensive than having complex machines to separate bottles and cans before they’re melted down and made into new products or exported to the developing world and dumped in a ditch in the case of loads of plastic bottles. Apparently one of the reasons why we no longer see re useable glass bottles is that the obsession with bacteria and health and safety meant that bottles had to be steam treated then sterilized in other ways to be safe and this meant that the cost was just too high to make it worthwhile.
I wonder if this will help?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/04/universal-basic-income-of-1600-pounds-a-month-to-be-trialled-in-england
This is our future: take the £1,600 a month Basic, live in a state-owned apartment in your 15-minute city and, when you die, the state takes all your money, all your possessions and reallocates the apartment to someone else. Those who seek to work and get past the various obstacles and show the right political views can live in more luxurious apartments and get to travel. Welcome to Soviet Britain where troublemakers are paid to stay out of the way.
It’s a financial prison: a jail cell with soft cushions. They’re banking on millions of people taking the basic and spending their lives drifting around, sitting in front of the TV and dying younger than they should. As a freelancer, I can see the temptation: one month I can earn far less than £1,600 and another I can earn far more. Someone who is single, in his 50s, with a bit of money saved could easily be bought off with the idea of living on Basic. Effectively retire early and drift. He’d probably die younger without the stimulation of work.
The lockdowns were a good testing ground for this…
I agree.
30 people is hardly a decent sample size for this ‘experiment’. I wonder what the criteria are to be included and why East Finchley and Jarrow wee chosen?
I worked for a ‘recycling’ company and the collected (smashed) glass was dumped in a large pile at the docks, picked up and transported to Portugal to be remanufactured. Really green.
“funds raised from retailers will go towards the operation and improvement of local council recycling services”
So it won’t go into a big pot that is used to pay for stoking foreign conflicts, sending military waste to Ukraine and handing over to weapons manufacturers? No increase to council tax to pay for council recycling changes?
“fees acting as an incentive for firms to use less packaging”
The packaging will likely become cheaper and less likely to be recycled but the product cost will increase to ensure profits are maximised from the policy change.
“funds raised from retailers will go towards the operation and improvement of local council recycling services”
And that statement is complete BS. Local Councils will simply use this extra funding in order to waste it on pay rises for Councillors and executive employees and any gormless schemes they dream up to fit the agenda de jour.
This is simply tax for taxes sake. It is one more knife into the consumers. If it helps to increase food bills – marvellous. Very useful in ramping up the starvation of the people.
Conservative Woman article on petitioning the monarch to prevent the ceding of national powers to foreign influences.
It’s a lawful route which we have to use, how successful it would be given Charlie boy’s affiliations to the WEF, etc is moot. But we can either sit back & moan or at least try something.
Can Toby help to promote this? The more widely it is circulated, the greater chance of the king feeling that he’s not got the affection of the population that he thought he had…
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/petition-the-king-to-keep-our-national-powers/
I have posted this already in the NR but no harm posting again BB. I guess you missed it.
Marvellous Hux!
I read NR much earlier today, not revisited so haven’t seen your post & it won’t hurt for it to be repeated.
I’ve emailed him too.
BB
Excellent. Thanks. 👍
I would suggest that the wording be slightly changed to include the International Health Regulations, as they are the real issue – they’ve already been agreed to and the clock is ticking to the final deadline in November. Silence on the matter means acceptance, and the silence from HMG is currently deafening.
We still have milk delivered from the farm at the top of the road. Bottles are washed and returned as they always have been.
In fact, I know of two other farms locally which still use rinse and return. This imposition is clearly just another means of taking cash from our pockets.
https://off-guardian.org/2023/06/04/this-week-in-the-new-normal-64/
The usual excellent round-up from Off-G. Something for everyone.
I have a trade waste contract for my company. We have always tried to seperate out the plastic packaging (sent to the street for collection in a stolen ‘blue’ bin) and cardboard, which we have taken to various supermarket recycling stations. Over the last few months a funny thing has happened, and the number of recycling centres that take cardboard has diminished for 6 to 2. We don’t want to choke the bins for others, so I approached the council specifically about cardboard. Their response was they they dont have a specific policy, and we should just put it in our main waste bin. So I asked around to see what happened to it, and was told by the crew who drive the collection truck, that it goes 15 miles down the road where it is put in a hole in the ground, or 5 miles west where it goes into a furnace. Reason.? There is so much cardboard recycled that there isn’t a market for it anymore. They can’t bundle and sell it like they used to. What a load of bollocks…
https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-reckless-power-grab-health-tyranny-postponed/5820978
Excellent article with interesting info around the ultimate power grabs – the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and the International Health Regulations. It appears the Davos Deviants are not yet having it all their own way.
Hey Rishi what has scwab offered you to sell the lives of the British citizenry? 13 pieces of gold?
Where is your dharma
This might have been posted already. Jump to 1:34:00 for the documentary:
https://thehighwire.com/thegreatawakeningpremiere/
If the funds were only to be used for disposals I am sure private businesses would offer to do it. We all know that much of the proceeds will be taken by the councils and used to fund woke training, staff pensions and the like.
NET ZERO————–The price will be in the trillions and government have no idea how to achieve it. Who in their right mind passes laws where the cost and means of achieving it is UNKNOWN? ———–Braindead Eco Socialist dreamers pandering to phony climate scaremongering from the UN rather than to the people who vote for them. The only western leader not falling in line with this scam was Trump. He may be a lot of things but at least he stopped the Eco Communism in it’s tracks for 4 years
With you completely. 👍