— By Plasteurope.com correspondent — 

The UK government has announced that use of the mass-balance approach for chemically recycled plastic for purposes of the Plastic Packaging Tax (PPT) will come into effect on 1 April 2027.

Mass balance allows industries to track materials and enables recycled or sustainable inputs mixed with virgin material during the process to be allocated to particular outputs.

Along with the mass balance announcement, the government also plans to remove the use of pre-consumer waste as recycled plastics for the purposes of the PPT on 1 April 2027.

Companies are liable to pay PPT if they have manufactured or imported plastic packaging components that contain less than 30% recycled plastics.

In October last year, the UK Finance Minister Rachel Reeves confirmed that the mass-balance methodology would be allowed by firms who wanted to show, for PPT purposes, how much recycled content was in chemically recycled plastics.

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The decision by Reeves followed a year-long consultation process and intense lobbying by the UK plastics industry and others across the packaging industry.

At the time, the government said there would be a legal requirement “for a certification scheme meeting prescribed requirements to be used to ensure that the integrity of the PPT is maintained”.

Ministers said they would “follow the principle that it must be possible for outputs to which recycled content is allocated to include some of that content”.

This, they said, was the best way to encourage more recycling of difficult-to-recycle plastics, such as films, “and to enable greater use of recycled plastics in applications where there are other regulatory requirements, such as food packaging”.

Meanwhile, the rate of the PPT rose on 1 April this year to GBP 223.69/t (EUR 263.20/t). When the plastic packaging tax was first levied in April 2022, it was GBP 200/t.