Rethink recycling: an open letter to the LGA

Dear LGA,

I write to you out of a genuine desire to understand your behaviour and motivations regarding packaging and recycling. This is because over the past few months your behaviour has proved to be impossible to understand, not just to myself but to a broad swathe of people, all of them more intelligent than me.

I am one of many people, from global brand owners, retailers, packaging manufacturers, designers, government departments and their associated advisors, who have joined forces and contributed significant expertise, time and effort to help you work towards improving recycling rates. We contributed this time and effort in the belief that you were serious about improving the current situation.

However, despite this apparent desire to work with the industry, you have persisted in unilaterally publishing what I and many others believe to be misleading and largely inaccurate reports on packaging waste.

These have been joined most recently by your campaign to invite consumers to identify wasteful packaging and to force supermarkets to reveal how much packaging they use. You know as well as I do that through the Courtauld Commitment and many other initiatives, there is now, in fact, almost no ‘excess’ packaging on supermarket shelves.

I can only conclude that you are not really serious about working with the packaging supply chain to solve the problem. Indeed, I believe that if you were serious about reducing packaging waste, rather than publicly attacking an industry that has in the past tried to help you, you would target the real obstacles to the UK improving its recycling rates. These are:

- A lack of joined-up thinking on recycling in central government, which leads to the wide range of local recycling regimes and means that it is extremely difficult for supermarkets and packaging manufacturers to make packaging that can be recycled everywhere;

- A seeming inability to understand that what you describe as waste is, in fact, a valued resource;

- An inability for local authorities to process this resource to the quality required so that the packaging industry, and others, can in turn use it.

These problems lie largely within your own remit to solve. This is, after all, why a large group of people assembled to help you in the first place. You have chosen to ignore this help and prefer to campaign.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely

Steve Kelsey

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