Three numbers have been sitting in packaging budgets all year. £461 a tonne for fibre-based composite, £423 for plastic, £192 for glass. They are real, they are confirmed, and they are the year-one extended producer responsibility rates, 2025/26.
Calculated on tonnages reported for 2024 and invoiced from October 2025. The liability now coming is year two, and it is priced on a different basis.
Year two changes two things at once. It resets the rate, and it starts charging on recyclability. The illustrative year-two figures published in December put plastic's amber rate at £455 a tonne and glass at £205. Illustrative is the operative word. Producers had until 1 September to resubmit their 2025 data, and PackUK locks the figures and issues Notices of Liability after that.
On plastic, the illustrative table runs £415 a tonne green, £455 amber, £545 red. That £130 spread is the price of a recyclability rating, and it is the only part of the year-two picture already written down.
What is settled is the multiplier. Under the Recyclability Assessment Methodology, red-rated packaging pays 1.2 times the amber rate in 2026/27, 1.6 in 2027/28 and 2.0 in 2028/29. Green pays less, funded by what red pays more. And red is where household packaging lands when it has not been assessed, or when the detail needed to assess it is not available — an automatic red under the methodology, not a judgement about the pack.
So the arithmetic worth doing this month is not tonnage times rate. It is this. How much of my tonnage is red, how much amber, how much green, and how much of the red is red only because an assessment was never submitted. Apply a rate you will know within weeks and the exposure falls out of it.
Tomorrow, we work the arithmetic in public: what the fees cost a mid-sized processor, where the avoidable money sits, and when a waste stream starts paying you back. Read in tomorrow's Dairy Mail.
Sources & data
- Defra, Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales: Recyclability assessment methodology — how to assess your packaging waste (RAM version 1.1, April 2025; page last updated 4 September 2025). Automatic reds include any household packaging in scope of the RAM which has not been assessed or where the detail required to undertake an assessment is not available
- The Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging and Packaging Waste) Regulations 2024, SI 2024/1332, regulation 64(8): where a liable producer has not provided sufficient information, the scheme administrator is to treat that packaging as having the same degree of environmental sustainability as the least environmentally sustainable household packaging in that packaging category
- PackUK: 2025 recyclability assessment requirements (published 27 June 2025), which applies regulation 64(8) as the Red RAM subcategory disposal fee and sets the H1 and H2 2025 recyclability assessment deadlines
- PackUK: illustrative year-two modulated disposal fees published December 2025
- PackUK: confirmed year-one base fees — fibre-based composite £461 a tonne, plastic £423, glass £192
Published by The Dairy Mail, Dairy Connect: https://www.dairy-connect.com/the-dairy-mail/packaging-year-two-prices-recyclability/
