What pEPR is
Extended producer responsibility means the producer of a product pays for what happens to it at the end of its life. For packaging, that principle became a scheme in 2025: any business that supplies or imports packaging into the UK above a threshold pays a fee per tonne of each material it puts on the market.
The money goes to local authorities to cover the full net cost of collecting, sorting and disposing of household packaging waste. Until 2025 that cost sat on council tax. The Scottish Government's estimate was around £150 million for Scottish councils in 2025-26, paid in three instalments starting in late 2025.
In the first year the fees were flat base rates by material, set to reflect average handling and recycling costs. Plastic was £423 a tonne and glass £192, with paper, card, aluminium, steel and wood each on their own rate.
- Producers pay for household packaging waste from 2025
- Flat base fees in year one: plastic £423/t, glass £192/t
- Fees modulated by recyclability from 2026-27
- Around £1.2bn a year to UK councils
- Around £150m to Scottish councils in 2025-26
- First payments made in late 2025
Why fees change from 2026-27
From the scheme's second year the fees are modulated. Each packaging format gets a red, amber or green rating for recyclability, and green-rated packaging pays a lower fee while red-rated packaging pays more. A plastic tray that every council can recycle costs its producer less than a black one that sorting machines cannot see.
That is the mechanism that is supposed to change what ends up on the shelf. A producer paying a premium for hard-to-recycle packaging has a direct reason to redesign it, and a council receiving fees tied to material tonnages has a direct reason to collect more of it.
Scotland and Wales have also chosen to keep the cost of littered packaging inside the fees, where England and Northern Ireland have paused that pending the deposit return scheme. Once deposits start in October 2027, cans and plastic bottles leave the kerbside bin and the fee calculations move with them.
Trade packaging is still yours to shift
Scheduled cardboard, film and mixed trade collections, with a transfer note every time.
What it means for households
Nothing changes in your bin. What changes is who pays for it. The council's recycling collection is now funded partly by producers rather than wholly by council tax, and the statutory recycling code coming by the end of 2026 will set what those collections have to include.
The money is tied to household packaging only. It does not fund bulky uplifts, garden waste, or the clearance of a house, which is why council bulky uplift charges have kept rising in the same year that packaging funding arrived.
A clear-out that produces a mountain of cardboard from flat-pack furniture or a house move is still your problem to shift. We take it as part of a house clearance and it is one of the easiest materials to divert.
What it means for businesses
If you supply packaged goods you may be a producer with reporting and fee obligations, depending on your turnover and the tonnage of packaging you handle. That is a compliance question for your accountant and the scheme administrator, not for a waste carrier.
What pEPR does not do is pay for your own packaging waste. The cardboard and film coming into a shop, a warehouse or a restaurant is commercial waste, collected under the business recycling rules and paid for by you. Our commercial waste collection service runs scheduled trade collections for exactly that.
For a shop or retail clearance at the end of a lease, the packaging left in the stockroom goes out with the fixtures, sorted by stream and with a transfer note.
