Our recent work on recycling - Recycling: Beware Of The Misleading PR – would suggest that the UK treasury will raise quite a bit of money from the plastics tax. We see very little chance of most packaging meeting a 30% recycled content goal any time soon, and possibly ever. We could see an odd dynamic where UK packagers import recycled resin from the EU to meet the minimums. This would then be at odds with EU recycled content goals and would need the EU to do something similar on the tax front to avoid the trade. The EU has a plastic tax in the works and its net effect will be similar to the one in the UK – any trade arbitrage for recycled resin would not likely last long.
