(Inspiration - Man Ray - linklink)
The next battle in the recycling world isn't going to be about collecting the bottles – it's going to be about who gets them afterwards.
Deposit Return Schemes were designed to answer the return issue. Consumers pay a small deposit when purchasing a drink, return the empty container and receive their money back. In theory, everybody wins; litter reduces, recycling rates increase and valuable materials are recovered for reuse, hoorah.For decades, this has been the holy grail of beverage recycling but what happens when we actually succeed? What happens when the bottles come back, because the next challenge may not be collecting them at all, instead, it will be deciding who controls them once they're returned.
DRS Creates Something Very Valuable
The UK Deposit Return Scheme is expected to generate enormous volumes of highly segregated material and to quote Depeche Mode, 'everything counts in large amounts'. Being specific, were not talking mixed plastics; not contaminated kerbside collections and not reject material from a Materials Recovery Facility.
Instead, DRS produces something far more valuable - clean PET bottles; clean HDPE containers, clean aluminium cans; all highly predictable material streams representing a consistent quality feedstock. In other words, exactly the type of material every recycler wants.
For years, the conversation around DRS has centred on recycling. Increasingly, particularly following the Government's decision to recognise chemically recycled content within Plastic Packaging Tax obligations, the conversation may need to shift. DRS is not simply creating recycling; it's creating one of the largest sources of clean, segregated plastic feedstock the UK has ever seen.
Most discussions about DRS quietly assume the same thing. The consumer returns bottle, the bottle gets recycled, the bottle becomes another bottle, job done, but there's a hidden assumption within that model. It assumes the traditional recycling industry will always be the preferred destination for that material, but what if that assumption is wrong?
Enter government endorsed chemical recycling - a process marketed as the solution for plastics that conventional recycling struggles to handle including flexible films (in scope - Simpler Recycling in March 2027), laminated packaging, mixed plastics, contaminated plastics, basically, the difficult stuff.
Chemical recyclers face the same challenge as every industrial process: feedstock quality matters a lot which raises an obvious conclusion - if a chemical recycling facility has access to millions of tonnes of clean, sorted PET and HDPE generated through DRS, why would it ignore them? Why would it deliberately choose lower-quality, contaminated materials when higher-quality material is readily available?
The Petrochemical Industry Twist
The waste industry often discusses chemical recycling as though it is simply another recycling technology but what if it evolves into something else entirely? What if chemical recycling becomes the next branch of the petrochemical industry? After all, plastic is fundamentally a hydrocarbon.
Chemical recycling seeks to convert plastic back into hydrocarbon feedstocks capable of becoming new plastic products and viewed through that lens, a returned PET bottle is no longer waste, it's a raw material, a resource, a feedstock and feedstocks attract competition.
Who Controls The Bottles?
Imagine a future where DRS return rates exceed 90%. Billions of containers are returned every year. The material is clean, consistent and has value which means suddenly multiple sectors are interested.
• Traditional recyclers want it.
• Bottle manufacturers want it.
• Supermarkets interested in closed loop packaging may want it.
• Environmentally aware brands may want it.
• Chemical recyclers will definitely want it.
• Petrochemical companies will want it.
At that point the question is no longer can we collect the bottles; the question becomes who gets them?
DRS As A Feedstock Harvesting System
The first generation of recycling policy focused on collection. The second generation focused on recovery. The third generation will without doubt focus on ownership and viewed like that, DRS begins to look less like a recycling scheme and more like a sophisticated feedstock harvesting system. More like this (DRS) - link - more like this (chemical recycling) - link - more like this (oil industry) - link
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