Trade Bodies Call for Government Actions on China

Originally written and published by Ben Wood at CIWM-Journal

Trade Bodies Call On Coffey for Action Over “China Situation” 

Four UK trade organizations have called on Defra to “take urgent action” to support the recycling industry.

The letter has been sent to the Environment Minister Thérèse Coffey MP, in which the heads of four UK trade organizations have called on Defra to “take urgent action” to support the recycling industry.

The letter is from the Confederation of Paper Industries, Resource Association, the Recycling Association and Environmental Services Association, and in it the bodies have also requested that WRAP returns to its focus on market development.

The trade associations have asked that Coffey sends a UK delegation to China to “negotiate at a high level in support of our desire to continue to provide the Chinese economy with secondary materials that they need, on terms that are reasonable and continue to protect the environment as well as being practicable in a UK context”.

This is in response to Chinese Government plans to “restrict imports of recovered materials unless they reach a contamination level of just 0.3%, as well as a complete ban on the import of post-consumer plastics and mixed papers”. The letter adds that this has “the potential to be very damaging for UK recycling performance”.

With Defra reviewing the future funding and programmes of WRAP, the four trade associations have asked the Minister and WRAP to return to the “pressing matter of ‘recycling market development’ and ‘demand-pull measures’ to encourage the use of secondary materials in UK manufactured products and open up new market opportunities” and link this to the developing Industrial Strategy.