Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2005

My Lords, these Benches welcome any effort to deal with the difficult problem of packaging. Obviously, we are all aware that packaging has not reduced in recent years. I am very pleased to hear the Minister’s statistics on recycling, which is an achievement. However, although we are recycling more, we should not become complacent. The hierarchy should be to reduce and then to recycle if packaging is reduced to the absolute minimum. I believe that the Minister in another place mentioned that these regulations would also have the effect of reducing the amount of packaging, but it was not clear how that would be done. Can the Minister explain that? The regulations refer on page 7 to recycling a whole list of materials. I was intrigued that the regulatory impact assessment chose to look at the fast food business as an example. The fast food business would have an opportunity to use one of the really new technologies; that is, to use containers made from plant starch, which would be the waste from another process—for example, potato packs which are made from potato peelings of potatoes used for food, and maize stems and leaves from maize that is grown for cattle feed. Both these waste products can be made into containers for packaging. Waste to packaging to compost seems to be a far more virtuous circle than using a prime product such as aluminium or whatever. There should be a little more effort put into creating a truly virtuous circle by using waste products in a more productive way. I would also like to ask what constitutes packaging for supermarket displays. I am sure that the Minister will have noticed that there are things that do not package the goods. I believe that they are referred to in the trade as shelf stackers, which make yoghurts, for example, sit up in stacks so that people can see them. They are for display purposes, but are they necessary and do they fall within the parameters of this regulation? They certainly should. They are not strictly speaking packaging. They are display material, the use of which has grown in recent years. Finally, packaging that is made of mixed materials is incredibly difficult to recycle, although I believe that there is a plant that can do it. What do these regulations do to discourage producers of packaging material from manufacturing things that are so hard to recycle? A very good example would be where perhaps two materials are necessary. To choose the yoghurt pot again, the firm Yeo Valley has chosen to use a very thin plastic to contain its yoghurt, but its display material is a cardboard wraparound on the outside. The two wrappers can be extremely easily separated for recycling purposes. Plastics should be labelled with their type of plastic. Through the summer, I collected all the containers that soft fruit, such as peaches, nectarines and strawberries, came in until I had a huge stack of them. My local authority said, ““Well, they are not recyclable because they are the wrong sort of plastic””. It is very hard for anyone to know the right and wrong types of plastic. I hope that manufacturers of packaging materials will get a lot better at helping, in this case, retailers, and consumers, by doing their bit to make much more obvious which sorts of material go where.