Packaging Regulations
 The Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Regulations) first came into force in Great Britain in 1997 and in Northern Ireland during 1999. The Regulations require businesses with a turnover greater than £2 million, which supply or import more than 50 tonnes of packaging a year, to register and fulfill an obligation to recover and recycle an amount of packaging waste.
Businesses that are obligated must go through a data collation exercise in order to discover the weight and type of packaging they supplied or imported in the previous year. Using this information a business can then calculate how many tonnes of PRNs of different material types they are required to purchase in order to fulfil their obligations.
PRNs are created by accredited reprocessors; they are essentially certificates that can be written out for any tonnage amount in a designated material type. The material types are specified as paper, glass, aluminium, steel, plastic, wood and ‘other’. The ‘other’ material category relates to packaging such as hessian, jute and cork.
An accredited reprocessor will calculate the amount of packaging waste they have reprocessed and can therefore issue PRNs to that tonnage value. These PRNs can then be sold on the open market or direct to obligated companies and compliance schemes. The reprocessor is obliged to inject all revenue from the sale of the PRNs to improving the reprocessing infrastructure, therefore increasing the amount that can be recycled.
 Compliance schemes such as Recycle First purchase PRNs on a quarterly basis on behalf of their members. The cost of a PRN fluctuates due to the law of supply and demand; for example, if very little aluminium packaging has been reprocessed in a given quarter the cost will rise as there are less PRNs available.
The Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 2007 came into effect on 16 December 2005 and update the previous 1997 regulations to take into account franchise businesses, businesses which rent out packaging and small companies who find data collation cumbersome. Franchise businesses will now need to register if they sell branded packaging or packaging purchased under a licence agreement or purchase obligation. Companies which rent out trays, pallets or boxes will need to register and all obligated companies which import end use pallets will now need to include them in their data submission. Small companies whose turnover is less than £5m can now opt for a simplified data gathering exercise based on their primary packaging type which they must adhere to for three years.
As a member of Recycle First, you will receive one to one assistance in calculating your obligated tonnage as well as low cost PRNs sourced directly from our own accredited reprocessing plants.
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