A Changing of the Guard

In the latest instalment of his exclusive column for BP&R, Director-General of the BPF, Philip Law, looks at how it’s ‘all change’ for the Federation’s President, outlines its position on the government’s environment consultations and looks at the wider picture of economic developments overseas. 

There has been a changing of the guard at the BPF with the election of a new President. Bruce Margetts has now completed two very distinguished years and has been succeeded by Martin Althorpe, Technical Director of Epwin’s Fenestration Division. 

Bruce, Managing Director of Bericap in the UK, has spent all his career in packaging with Autobar, RPC and, latterly, Bericap. In his spare time, he is a rowing enthusiast and Chairman of Lincoln Rowing Club. Despite this heavily committed programme he was always readily available to offer advice and was a really great fund of innovative approaches to the issues of the day.

Martin is the first Windows industry representative to be President of the BPF and he brings with him very many years’ experience as Chairman of the BPF Windows Group. When the PVC issue was at its height, Martin was very much involved with the BPF helping to resolve issues arising from intense inter-material competition. We are very much looking forward to working with Martin.

Response position

Much of the last month has been spent in responding to the suite of UK government consultations relating to plastics packaging waste, which has implications for the whole plastics industry, not just in the UK, but also elsewhere. 

These cover a proposed plastics packaging tax; extended producer responsibility; standardised household collections; and deposit return schemes. We have listened very hard to public comments on plastics waste over the last 18 months and we are very much on the same page in wanting to reduce environmental impacts. 

We have had detailed consultations with plastic packaging manufacturers, raw material suppliers and recyclers, to arrive at our single positions and we have also borne in mind the positions taken by wider business sectors who are essential to the supply chain. We have also taken advice from independent authorities.

Beware unintended consequences

Our general position is that we are certainly prepared to play our part in increasing recycling, move towards greater circularity in the ‘plastics economy’ and take on a fair share of costs in doing so. But we want the best possible environmental outcomes for all the measures proposed and little in the way of unintended consequences. 

Our comments were made in that spirit. In fact, the consultation on the standardisation of household waste collections had its origins in discussions the BPF had several years ago with Rory Stewart, then a Defra Minister. We have welcomed the DRS proposals emerging in Scotland and want to see a unified approach to this and measures across all constituents of the UK.

Positive PVC figures

In another area of the plastics sustainability story it was reported this month that PVC recycling in Europe, under the aegis of VinylPlus, has registered a 15.6 per cent increase in 2018 taking it to 739,532 tonnes. This is 92 per cent of Vinyl Plus’s 2020 target. Cumulatively over 5million tonnes of PVC have been recycled in Europe since 2000. In the frame of a voluntary commitment and given the long-life nature of PVC products I would hail this as a heroic achievement!

Clouds on the horizon? 

Finally, with all the major geopolitical issues crowding our screens and newspapers a potentially significant development has been brewing in the eastern Mediterranean region which could have major consequences for patterns of development in Europe. 

This has been pointed out to me by a Greek friend and it is the enormous reserve of gas recently found around Cyprus. It will be long in development and will probably heighten tensions between Greece and Turkey but is something in the long term which could affect the economics of manufacturing within its striking distance.

Philip Law is the Director-General of the British Plastics Federation, the trade association for the plastics industry in the UK and Ireland.