The British Retail Consortium warns that the Government’s new bottle recycling scheme could cost retailers £1.8 billion annually, with consumers likely to bear the brunt of the costs. The Telegraph has the story.
The Government’s flagship bottle recycling scheme will cost companies ten times the amount that officials previously claimed, industry analysis suggests.
According to calculations by the British Retail Consortium (BRC), the planned deposit system for the purchase of drinks bottles and cans will cost retailers at least £1.8 billion a year.
Much of the cost is likely to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, prompting calls for the scheme to be delayed or even scrapped.
The BRC said its analysis highlighted the need for a delay to “rethink” current plans in order to “prevent the introduction of an unnecessarily complex and costly scheme”.
It comes after a separate scheme to charge retailers and manufacturers for the cost of councils recycling their packaging was delayed by ministers, following concerns raised by retailers and MPs over the likely impact on the cost of household goods.
In the Government’s official impact assessment for the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) – seen by the Telegraph – the annual cost was estimated to be £171 million a year back in 2019.
However, analysis from the BRC, which represents major supermarkets, suggests that the annual cost to the retail industry will be at least £1.8 billion a year from 2025, a figure ten times that amount.
The scheme includes special ‘reverse vending machines’ to be installed in shops for consumers to return plastic bottles and drinks cans and receive their cash back, with costs to the industry including ensuring the machines are protected from the elements or criminals as well as those associated with storage and logistics of returned bottles.
The BRC believes that the costs to the industry will rise even further, as their calculations do not include the cost from the industry to set up an industry body to run the scheme, the cost of which they say would run into the hundreds of millions.
Craig Mackinlay, who chairs the Net Zero scrutiny group of Conservative MPs, said: “The Deposit Return Scheme, although laudable in its intent to increase recycling and minimise plastic waste, comes with a considerable price-tag.
“The cost will simply be added to prices and so will be inflationary. As ever it will hit the poorest hardest. The current delay is welcome, a permanent scrapping of the whole idea would be even more so.”
The scheme, along with the delayed Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme, was devised by the then-Environment Secretary Michael Gove to help the U.K. to reduce waste and was billed as helping Britain meet its Net Zero target.
The BRC said that “margins remain slim” on produce and have “significantly tightened in the last year”, which meant that “while retailers may be able to absorb some of the costs of implementing these new policies, it is inevitable that introducing EPR and DRS together would place upward pressure on consumer prices”.
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Roger Scruton described the USSR lasting for so long as the software of Bolshevism ossifying into hardware. Russians started each day with the sole determination to survive that day. To do so meant going along with things ‘to get by’, ‘reading the script to fit it’.
Peter Hitchens observed that when communism collapsed in Russia the waste bins in the streets were filled with party membership cards being burned. Whether the owners had read Marx and understood the theories or not, their allegiance was just performative; a necessity to survive.
Katie Lam read the transcripts from the court hearings to a largely empty House. The expressions on the faces of the other MPs was as if they had been passengers on the Titanic and had been informed that a cold sea awaited them, not the bright lights of Broadway and the expensive shops of Fifth Avenue.
Julie Bindel can write her articles on the phenomena of white girls used as prey animals until the sun turns red but they will always be the same. Just cut and paste, Julie, to save your time and ours.
If Reform UK or any other political organisation is used to represent a ‘white community’, both merely become part of the system of governance known as diversity. It would, along with the demonstrable fact that, as Ben Cobley says, everyone just knows the rules of how they must fit into being governed, proves that the software of diversity has ossified into hardware.
Those who are troubled by the way in which so many of the most vile crimes have clearly been swept under the carpet by so many for so long should contribute to They Knew. It is clear that the current government have every intention of doing all they can to keep the truth hidden, only legal action by the people for the victims can bring it to light.
How odd of God to choose liberal social science of the ungodly West to advance the fortunes of a religion of late antiquity.
Alternatively, if like Darwin one didn’t believe in a deity and substituted evolution for the historicism of the religion, this fusion of two things that would never have met in the natural world would be like the way in which the x Cupressocyparis leylandii was created.
Reversion – becoming a ‘revert’ – is the premise behind the assertion that Britain is a nation of immigrants.
A person’s ancestors may have been in the territory, in the polity, for centuries, but their descendent living today has just ‘forgotten’ that they are an immigrant. Believing that they are indigenous is ‘false consciousness’. They must just revert in order to become as one with all other immigrants.
Alternatively, that reversion might be called ‘reverse assimilation’. Unlike some colonial expats in the British Empire, they do not need to leave the shores of Britain to have ‘gone native’, as the Victorians called it.
The simplistic DEI mantra, in its current form, is a form of control. Akin to a divide and conquer strategy. It starts off as a mix of minority groups vs the white ethnicity, sexually straight, majority. However, as the minority groups rise in size, they start squabbling among themselves and massive discriminations across these groups become visible, as the tensions of the world replicate themselves within British society. One example of this is eg South Asians in Britain going on about racism and discrimination but anyone who has worked in such nations of origin already knows that those cultures are near the top of the global list for blatant racism, discrimination, exploitation, and injustices. Funnily enough, this is hardly ever discussed in Britain, which provides clues as to what is really going on here. The technical terms to describe this are opportunism and corruption. This phenomenon has become more apparent but, based on the current trajectory, it is going to become much worse, with a looming risk of societal disintegration.