Suez publishes review of Defra producer-responsibility proposals

Suez has published a report providing a critical review of Defra’s proposed plans and options for a new extended producer responsibility (EPR) regime.

The report, entitled ‘Unpackaging extended producer responsibility consultation proposals’, is a follow-up to Suez’s ‘Unpackaging extended producer responsibility report’, which was published in September 2018 and set out ten principles for the UK to achieve a world-class producer-responsibility regime.

In its latest publication, Suez provides an assessment of Defra’s proposals against these ten principles, which were originally developed in consultation with various organisations from across the value chain.

This new assessment comes following the Defra publication ‘Our waste, our resources: A strategy for England’, in December 2018, and the four consultation documents, which seek views on options for extended producer responsibility, collection consistency, deposit return schemes and a plastic packaging tax, all of which were published in February 2019.

Now that the detail of these policies is known, in its latest report, Suez provides a brief overview of the four extended producer responsibility governance models and the payment mechanisms proposed by Defra, setting out some of the high-levels challenges, as well as a more detailed comparator assessment of these models against the principles for a best practice extended responsibility regime.

Suez does not believe that any of the four models proposed by Defra is suitable in its entirety and instead favours building a hybrid model compromising the optimal elements from each option to meet the desired outcomes, one example of which is presented in this report.

Stuart Hayward-Higham, author of the report and Technical Development Director at Suez, said: “With the publication of this short report we have sought to share insight from our own analysis, our sector experience and our discussions with partners and stakeholders across the value chain.”

‘We have used this to assess the extent to which Defra’s various options meet the ambitious we set our last year, with others, for a world-class extended producer responsibility regime which brings us a step closer to the circular economy we all strive for.”

“We applaud Defra for the work that they have done, but having conducted our own comprehensive analysis in collaboration with many others, we do not believe any single model of those presented in the consultation documents delivers on all ten of the principles of a world-class extended producer responsibility system.”

“As such, Suez favours a hybrid model, the construction of which we discuss in the report.”