The UK Packaging Pact officially launches with almost 100 organisations announced as signatories to WRAP’s ten-year programme.
Founding signatories of the pact include major supermarkets Aldi, ASDA, and Sainsbury’s, as well as bodies from the resource and waste sector such as Biffa and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM).
Government and industry bodies, including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the British Retail Consortium, were also announced as founding signatories.
The ten-year programme aims to transform the UK’s packaging system into a sustainable operation through coordinated action across multiple sectors.
Commenting on the launch, Catherine David, CEO of WRAP, said: “The UK Packaging Pact is a unique, complete system approach to unlocking packaging transitions across the value chain.”
“No other programme brings together the key players needed to deliver the enormous changes we must make. Policies are essential, but they alone cannot deliver, and the Packaging Pact will deliver the practical change necessary through a flexible framework allowing signatories to focus on the actions most important to them.”
WRAP, the global environmental action NGO, says it developed the new cross-sector agreement to help industry manage costs and address packaging waste.
The new agreement follows the UK Plastics Pact and expands to every packaging material placed on the market, from glass, paper, card, metal, as well as plastics and biobased materials.
WRAP says the pact also provides a ‘direct route’ for industry to inform and shape regulation.
The UK Packaging Pact has four interconnected goals:
- Optimise packaging – To reduce single-use packaging, remove less sustainable packaging and introduce more recyclable packaging.
- Scaling reuse and refill – To drive interoperable systems that increase the proportion of packaging that is reusable compared to single-use.
- Support infrastructure investment – To build a reliable evidence base to accelerate and unlock new investment for key materials.
- Harmonise data – To simplify data reporting requirements through standardisation and alignment.
Dan Cooke, Director of Policy, Communications and External Affairs at CIWM, said that the Institution was pleased to be a founding signatory of the pact.
“Large parts of the UK’s recycling markets and infrastructure have been largely failing for the past decade and more, due to a heady combination of poorly designed and often unrecyclable composite packaging, challenging economics, and a lack of clear incentivising policy support,” Cooke said.
“The UKPP has a clear opportunity to enable closer engagement between packaging sector players and recycling service providers, and to identify real opportunities for investment in better packaging and more UK recycling infrastructure.”
“CIWM’s members are experts and practitioners throughout this value chain, and we look forward to actively supporting UKPP’s progress.”
Cooke said the sector will be keen to see progress against the pact’s ‘clear’ objectives, and called for ‘significantly increased investment’ in UK recycling and reprocessing infrastructure.
