What Europe can teach us in recycling push

British officials have been travelling across Europe to learn more about bottle return schemes and will attempt to reproduce the most successful measures in the UK.
The mission to develop a world-leading deposit return scheme (DRS) is part of a wider range of initiatives to boost recycling, which has not moved at the household level in England for the past decade.
Concerns were raised this week over some councils giving households as many as seven bins, although the average is four. Under government plans to end a postcode lottery so people can recycle the same materials wherever they live, most homes are expected to be streamlined to about three bins: dry recycling, food waste and non-recyclable rubbish.
The long-delayed DRS is a key measure to promote recycling. From 2027, a fee of about 20p is expected to be added to the price of single-use plastics, aluminium and steel drink containers across the UK. The money will be refunded when people return the bottle to a “reverse vending machine” in shops for recycling.
There are more than 50 such schemes around the world. Senior figures at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are interested in learning best practice from other schemes, particularly those in the Netherlands and in Denmark, as well as in Germany and Sweden. Officials gaining insight said there was no “one size fits all” way of doing a DRS.
However, most have several things in common. With the exception of Germany, which has a decentralised system, they have one central system operator, typically run by retailers and industry. It is an approach that the UK will copy.
Most of the projects have a target of recycling at least 90 per cent of material, although whether they achieve it depends partly on the fee. Set it too low, as several Australian states have done with a charge of 10 Australian cents (about 5p), and the recycling rates have been poor. The sweet spot seems to be 15p to 25p to make it worth people’s while to take back the container, research suggests.
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European schemes have generally fared much better than ones in Australia and several states in America. Acceptance and engagement among the public are much higher in Europe and there is no reason it should be different in the UK if the scheme is well communicated, officials said.
One thing that is different in the UK is scale. Aside from Germany, which has had a scheme for more than two decades, most of the more recently launched initiatives are in countries with a much smaller population, such as the five million people in Ireland, where one started this year.
A potential divide between Britons and their European peers will be existing habits. One official was struck talking to the Dutch that they do not have kerbside recycling, so people are used to returning recycling to drop-off points. Taking old bottles back to machines would be a behaviour change in Britain, they said, but return points will be at places that people are going to anyway, including supermarkets.
Trials are also under way to boost recycling from homes. In England household recycling rates have hovered at about 44 per cent for a decade, despite a target of 65 per cent by 2035.
A £3 million pilot project has resulted in 70,000 households across nine councils separating the plastic packaging of rice and pasta packets, film over chicken, crisp packets and chocolate bar wrappers. Such flexible plastic packaging is the last major material not yet widely collected at the kerbside.
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UK households are believed to use up to 600,000 tonnes of the material a year. Stuart Hayward-Higham, of the waste firm Suez, which has run the FlexCollect trial, said early findings showed that Britons had more of a taste for confectionery and crisps than their European neighbours, who had recycled the plastic material for years. Encouragingly, preliminary results indicate low contamination rates and high participation.
“It seems to be quite an important one for the consumer. I suppose it’s Blue Planet: people want to do something better. And they get a lot of this material in their bins,” said Hayward-Higham.
The flexible material has so far been collected by households in a separate bag. However, a trial starting in October will see it collected loose in recycling bins and the material later sorted at recycling centres. The success or failure of that will influence whether or not households need more bins or bags.
A Defra spokesman said: “We want a future where we keep our resources in use for longer, waste is reduced and the path to net zero is accelerated.”