In 2025, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) scheme started to become more apparent: making companies of a certain size start to foot the bill for collecting, sorting, and recycling household packaging—aimed at shifting the £1.5B+ annual cost from taxpayers to the producers.
EPR targets producers of different sizes and handling packaging yearly, with base fees calculated per tonne for plastic based on 2024 data.
From 2026, fees get “modulated” by recyclability scores, pushing smarter designs to try and slash the millions of tonnes of plastic waste dumped yearly.
Advice to companies:
- Get 2024-25 plastic tonnage per country and per polymer
- Run recyclability checks using available toolkits
- Budget for higher fees on non-recyclable formats from 2026
Know your Liabilities and Exposure: Producers will have to learn quickly and if necessary pivot fast to avoid higher penalties and liabilities. RPM Program is currently partnering with experts in this area that can offer advice and support to producers.
Get in contact for more information.
Recyclers Remain Under Strain
For years recycling has been seen as the ‘great hope’ for plastic management. Everyone feels better about the thought of recycling and having plastic waste marked for recycling..
Recycling is definitely part of the solution but we cannot recycle our way out of this plastic management crisis.
Why Not?
- We do not have enough recycling capacity
- Recycling is often deemed not economical
- Contamination rates make most loads commercially worthless
- Most plastic is designed for convenience, performance and margin: not recycling.
Realities
- Only 14% of plastic packaging globally is collected for recycling
- Over 70% of plastics placed on the market are not economically recyclable
- 40% of global packaging is single use and structurally very difficult to recycle
Recycling matters, but it cannot carry your entire plastic management strategy. And if that’s where your strategy starts and ends, you need to raise your game.
Here are some RPM considerations for 2026:
- Use less – Eliminate pointless plastics where possible. Seek to redesign plastic consumption moments. Challenge the “default to plastic” thought process.
- Use better – Think Mono-materials. Standardisation of design. Reduced additive complexity. (Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimates standardisation alone could increase recyclability by 20–50%)
- Reuse more – Not an experiment. A necessity. The World Economic Forum estimates reuse models could cut plastic waste by 20% by 2040.
- Recycle smartly – Make decisions based on the recyclers ability, not false confidence. Find out more about where your plastic goes. Infrastructure needs to be aligned to real material flows. If its not readily accessible keep horizon scanning.