International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

it recycled, the requirement for companies to demonstrate obligations have been
met, and the Repak scheme to reward collectors for collecting packaging waste. As
far as we are aware, there has been no attempt to ‘apportion’ responsibility for the
improvement to any one of the measures, let alone the Regulations themselves vis a
vis other policy instruments. Several changes have been taking place simultaneously,
so some of these will have contributed to progress made, notably, in our view, the
increase in landfill gate fees, and the increasing buoyancy of markets for secondary
materials in recent years.
Although the legislation and efforts to date have been heavily focused on targets
associated with recycling and recovery, it seems that there is a desire to shift
emphasis in future towards packaging waste prevention. Initiatives thus far have
centred around suasive measures, sometimes funded with public support. However,
there would be merit in seeking to ensure that the RPS payments covered the whole
cost of the provision of the collection service to households and businesses, this itself
acting as an incentive to encourage additional effort in waste prevention on the part
of producers.
However, even with such a measure in place, there would be merit in – and the
forgoing suggests that several stakeholders would support – measures to instate,
within legislation, stronger requirements to take efforts to prevent waste. To the
extent that this might stretch to consumers as well as producers, one means through
which to achieve this could be efforts to provide those businesses who are not
producers with the training and technical guidance to complete internal audits and
assessments and identify areas within their businesses where packaging can be
minimised. The approach to producers ought to be somewhat different, and should be
considered as part of the obligation placed upon producers. Hence, whilst producers
should be required to take actions to reduce, and prevent, packaging waste, public
support should be targeted at those who are not producers, with assistance given to
help minimise the generation of packaging waste. Furthermore, households could be
encouraged, though changes in legislation, to report examples of excess packaging,
which would trigger inspections of these cases against the technical arguments in
support of the packaging approach used.
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