Cardboard coffee cups face ‘plastic’ charge
Ministers drop explicit reference to takeaway products that could lead to customers paying extra
TAKEAWAY coffee cups and disposable wooden cutlery could be the next products that come with an extra charge for consumers under a little-noticed government legal change.
Ministers yesterday agreed to alter the definition in law of “single use items” which could face charges, dropping an explicit reference to “plastic” products.
It means that the law used to order supermarkets to charge people 10p for a plastic bag could be applied in a similar way for non-plastic items.
It opens the door to people having to pay extra if they want to get a coffee in a cardboard cup or be given wooden cutlery to eat takeaway food.
Government figures informed The Daily Telegraph the legal change was needed to help tackle “throwaway culture”, given the wider drive towards more green practices.
But they stressed no final decisions have been taken about applying new charges, saying that a public consultation would be needed before any such move. Britons are increasingly carrying their own coffee cups which are then filled up when they purchase coffee – a trend the Government is keen to encourage.
Some 2.5 billion coffee cups are used and thrown away each year in the UK, according to estimates in a Commons environmental audit committee report in 2018.
The move comes as Boris Johnson attempts to drive forward a huge transformation of the economy to make the UK a net zero emitter of carbon by 2050.
More than 700 pages of government documents released on Tuesday outlined the most detailed plan yet for how the UK hopes to reach the climate change target. Yet uncertainty remains about the scale of costs coming for households and businesses. Ministers argue the economic cost of inaction on climate change is far greater.
The change was made to the Environment Bill, which is going through the Commons, and followed an amendment backing the move from the House of Lords.
Rebecca Power, the parliamentary under secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, told the Commons yesterday: “I am delighted to be cracking on with the Environment Bill. Make no mistake that this is a landmark piece of legislation that will increase our resource efficiency and biodiversity, drive improvements in air and water quality, and put us on the sustainable trajectory for the future that I believe we all want and need.” In May, the Government increased the single use carrier bag charge from 5p to 10p after success in driving down the number of plastic bags people use. Before the bag charge was introduced, an average household used around 140 single use plastic carrier bags a year, according to the Government, but that has now been reduced to four.
♦nine of the world’s biggest emitters have missed the deadline for climate goals ahead of Cop26, Alok Sharma has admitted. Just over a week before the landmark climate conference in Glasgow, the minister told MPS that major countries including China and Saudi Arabia still had not submitted plans to help cut global carbon emissions. The G7, EU, South Africa and Argentina have all published updates, while South Korea did submit a new target last year but did not set a more ambitious goal.