The plastic tax has stalled. The real shift starts with November’s invoices.

Three years of falling receipts

HMRC published its annual Plastic Packaging Tax figures this week, and they tell a story the packaging industry cannot ignore. Receipts fell for the third year running, down to £250 million. Just 37% of plastic packaging was declared taxable, barely changed from the year before. The number that matters most: four years into the tax, more than a third of UK plastic packaging still cannot reach the 30% recycled content threshold.

The reason is simple economics. Recycled polymer usually costs more than virgin material, and with virgin prices persistently low, several UK recyclers have closed rather than compete. A tax of £228.82 per tonne has not been enough to change what packs are made of.

November changes the question

What will change them is a different piece of legislation entirely. Under Extended Producer Responsibility, plastic packaging now attracts fees of £423 per tonne against £196 for paper and board, and plastic rated hard to recycle is heading towards £545. The first modulated EPR invoices land on producers’ desks in November. When they do, the question asked in boardrooms across the food industry will change from “can we hit 30% recycled content?” to “what would this pack cost us in board?”

Decided in the boardroom, proven at the infeed

Here is what we see from the factory floor: the decision to switch a tray from plastic to fibre is made in the boardroom, but it succeeds or fails at the infeed. Every tray that reaches your tray sealer or flow wrapper has to be denested and fed first. Converters are right when they say the new board and fibre formats run on existing sealing equipment without capital investment; what that claim skips is the feeding. Pressed board trays, gas-tight board trays and moulded fibre trays warp, vary in dimension from batch to batch, nest unpredictably in the stack and bruise if handled roughly. Machinery designed around consistent thermoformed plastic struggles with all of it.

This is the problem PiP Automation has spent years solving. We automate sustainable packaging formats that conventional machinery struggles to handle. Our denesters are already running card and Halopack trays in production for UK food manufacturers, and we have successfully denested compressed fibre trays on our in-house test rig. As food packaging moves away from plastic, PiP Automation provides the equipment needed to make sustainable packaging run at production speed.

The direction of travel

The direction of travel is not in doubt: in a recent industry survey, 88% of packaging professionals said they expect legislation to dictate material choice, and fibre is forecast to lead global food packaging by 2045. The only open question is whether your line will be ready when the format decision arrives.

If you are weighing up a switch, put us to the test before you commit. Send us your trays; we will run them on our test rig and send you the video. Or come and talk to us at the PPMA Show, 22 to 24 September at the NEC.