On Thursday 17 July 2025, Nick Timothy MP took part in a debate about the use of plastics. I spoke up for a local West Suffolk firm — Chase Plastics in
Brandon, where I am pictured below with CEO David Harris during a visit earlier this year.
He said there is a problem with regulation that punishes higher-standard British reprocessors and gives a false equivalence to recycling done by lower-standard overseas competitors.
This is bad for British business and for the environment.
More background
The Packaging Recovery Note (PRN) system was introduced almost 30 years ago and was intended to support investment in the UK Recycling Industry.
Producers, fillers and retailers of packaging (obligated companies) are required to buy PRNs to cover their recycling obligations; companies carrying out recycling are able to issue PRNs and sell them to obligated companies.
Yet, rather than benefitting the UK Recycling Industry, this has served to decimate the industry. The reason for this was that a company exporting waste is also able to issue a Packaging Export Recovery Note (PERN) which is equivalent in value to a PRN.
This means that an individual sending waste to an unknown fate overseas, with no requirement for investment, received the same incentive as a company investing millions in machinery.
The PERN system is a major reason for the widely reported issues with badly managed plastic waste in developing countries. Furthermore the PERN system is open to abuse and fraud.
The industry has been reporting this to the Environment Agency (EA) and successive governments for decades without success.
For at least the past two years, record numbers of PRN / PERNs have been issued despite the industry having a significant proportion of its processing capacity switched off.
The upshot is that waste is now often taken from the UK to countries such as Turkey that have much lower standards than in the UK.
