Stuart Foster, Recoup CEO with Lord de Mauley, Resource Minister for Defra and representatives from the Plastic Matters initiative founding signatories.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has announced that it will be providing £20,000 of funding for a new recycling campaign aimed at increasing the capture of plastic.
The ‘Plastic Matters’ initiative, run by recycling company and charity, Recoup, aims to provide local authorities with communication tools to encourage participation in plastic recycling. It aims to emulate the success of Alupro’s metal recycling campaign, ‘MetalMatters’.
Speaking at Recoup’s annual conference on Thursday (26 September), Resource Minister Lord de Mauley welcomed the launch of the new initiative, and pledged to fund the campaign with £20,000 of government money to help support consumer behaviour research. It is this research that Recoup says is “key to changing consumer behaviour”.
“A significant step” in plastic recycling
Speaking to delegates at the conference, de Mauley said that the scheme would be “a significant step to help reduce waste, achieve the ambitious plastic packaging recycling targets to 2017, and keep valuable plastic resources from ending up in landfill.”
He added: “Some of you will have heard me say that I have a vision of England as a place where resources are used more effectively, and substantially less waste is created in the first place, with the vast majority being recycled or reused.
“Plastic Matters will go a significant way to helping make this a reality, that is why I’m pleased to announce that Defra will be joining others in offering financial support to Recoup to help kickstart this project.”
Recoup added that it hopes the campaign will encourage consumer awareness of plastic waste and, ‘with clear messages to minimise confusion’, help consumers make the right decisions.
Defra has become the latest signatory to ‘Plastic Matters’, following sign-ups from WRAP, Marks & Spencer, Kent Resource Partnership, Unilever, Veolia, Closed Loop Recycling and Valpak. Recoup has urged more organisations to align themselves with Recoup’s cause.
Recoup CEO, Stuart Foster said: “Understanding consumer behaviour is the key to changing consumer behaviour, and as such the first activity under the new initiative will be an in depth plastic recycling consumer insight study to build on existing knowledge.
“From this work, the steering group made up of the founding signatories will develop the consumer facing campaign and will aim to launch the consumer facing tools before the end of the year.”
Other key points of the conference included:
- the launch of Recoup’s two flagship documents, the ‘2013 UK Household Plastics Packaging Collection Survey’ and a guide to encourage designers to make their packaging more recyclable, ‘Recyclability By Design’;
- a debate over the exclusion of biodegradable plastic bags from the new carrier bag tax; and
- a discussion on the ‘lack of parity’ within the packaging recovery note (PRN) and packaging export recovery note (PERN) systems.
Read more about Recoup.
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