20 Nov. 2024: The Recycling Association has called on the Government to abandon the deposit return scheme (DRS), after the Welsh Government decided to leave the UK-wide joint scheme and pursue its own system.

It said that DRS has been “a disaster from start-to-finish”.

Chief executive Paul Sanderson said: “The only people who want a DRS are the soft drinks manufacturers and politicians.

“All of this chaos and years of getting nowhere and still we are talking about when it will be introduced.

“With Wales pulling out of the UK DRS, now is the perfect time to abandon this folly. Instead, let’s focus on introducing the important extended producer responsibility and simpler recycling regimes.”

Sanderson said the public would be unwilling to return containers to retailers “when they have a perfectly good recycling scheme at home already”.

The Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (Larac) said development of the DRS should be halted until other policies were in place.

It said the proposed scheme was claimed to help to drive up capture rates and improve quality for PET and aluminium drinks containers, but these were “already successfully captured in existing kerbside infrastructure, whilst DRS fails to capture other challenging materials that drive down capture rates, whilst increasing costs to consumers and removing valuable material from local authority waste streams”.

An impact assessment for DRS estimated its development would cost billions of pounds in 2019, and this was “likely to be considerably more now”.

Robert Lewis, Larac’s Welsh representative, said: “For many years, Wales has led the way in recycling rates through the UK.

“This has been achieved without a DRS, instead focusing on strong kerbside collections, investment in communication and engagement with citizens, and allowing local authorities the enforcement powers and flexibility to best perform, such as by deciding on residual collection frequency.

“For the price of DRS, this could be replicated across the whole of the UK, increasing capture and recycling rates for packaging beyond drinks containers, and even beyond packaging.”

Larac chair Cathy Cook said: “The Welsh exit from a UK-wide DRS should act as a wake-up call to the regulators that the current plans for DRS should be put on hold, and that the impact of other policies including EPR for packaging and simpler recycling (in England), should be measured before billions of pounds is invested to disrupt current infrastructure and behaviours.”

The Federation of Independent Retailers’ president Mo Razzaq said the Welsh decision, coupled with its intention to include glass in its scheme, would cause unnecessary confusion.

He said: “Interoperability across the UK is vital, so that anyone buying a drinks can in England will have the confidence that they can return it in Wales.

”A single UK-wide scheme would be far more successful, efficient and effective, enabling shoppers to understand and embrace DRS as quickly as possible.”

This story was originally published by our sister title, Materials Recycling World. By Mark Smulian, PackagingNews