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Beverage Containers: Recycling

Answer

Defra has not made an assessment of trends in the levels of recycling rates for plastic, metal and glass beverage containers.

However, Defra’s Impact Assessment for the Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) uses external estimates of the recycling rates for beverage containers made of specific materials for specific years –

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukia/2024/217/pdfs/ukia_20240217_en.pdf

Defra more routinely publishes annual statistics on the total amount of UK packaging waste that is recycled broken down by material types. The following table shows the amount of packing waste recycled by material types for 2023. The amount of recycled packaging is based on tonnages reported by accredited reprocessors and exporters under the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations.

Table1: Packaging waste and recycling, split by material, UK 2023 (thousand tonnes and % rate)

Material	Packaging waste arising	Total recycled	Achieved recycling rate
Metal	774	551	71.2%
— of which: Aluminium	277	162	58.6%
— of which: Steel	497	389	78.3%
Paper and cardboard	5,422	3,980	73.4%
Glass	2,680	1,818	67.8%
Plastic	2,259	1,186	52.5%
Wood	1,504	668	44.4%
Other* materials	23	0	0.0%
Total	12,662	8,204	64.8%

Notes

* ‘Other’ includes materials such as cloth, corks, gel, glue, hessian sacks and wax used as packaging

Arisings estimates made at point of manufacture.

UK packaging waste figures by material types for 2012 to 2023 can be found in the UK statistics on waste dataset: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-waste-data.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

55181

Session

2024-26

Subjects

Glass Recycling Metals Plastics Beverage containers

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.parliament.uk