Almost two-thirds of revenue generated in 2013 from the Packaging Recovery Notes system (PRNs/PERNs) were used to fund collections or reduce secondary material prices, reports from reprocessors and exporters indicate.
According to figures released by the Environment Agency, last year PRN and PERN issuers raised more than £111.5m in total.
Of this, they said 33.6% went to fund collections of recyclables, and 31.2% to subsidise prices or develop new markets
The rest was invested in infrastructure or retained for future capital expenditure. Only 1.7% was spent to cover the costs of complying with the regulations.
Glass remelt PRN reprocessors raised over £28m, the highest amount among materials reprocessors and exporters.
But of this, only 6.4% was used to fund collections. Some 58% went to reducing prices and 34.7% was retained to increase infrastructure capacity or for future investments.
The recyclers that claimed to spent the highest relative amount on funding collections were glass remelt exporters (64.2%), and glass aggregate reprocessors (49.9%), followed by paper exporters (42%).
Aluminium reprocessors used 26% of their revenue to develop communication strategies, the highest percentage among recyclers.
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Readers' comments (1)
Anonymous2 April, 2014 4:39 pm
It would be interesting to further segregate out the export PERN, this would show the true value of investment into UK Reprocessing, which is after all what the system is designed to do, grow UK reprocessing instead of NIMBY growth
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