EU’s strict new packaging and recycling laws ‘could apply to Northern Ireland’

Northern Ireland food businesses could fall under the European Union’s strict new laws on packaging and recycling, according to industry insiders.

Measures such as packaging reduction targets could incur higher costs for UK producers and trigger a clash with the EU, similar to the one surrounding ‘Not for EU’ labelling requirements last year, The Grocer understands.

In April, the EU approved a series of measures to make packaging more sustainable and reduce packaging waste across the bloc. This includes packaging reduction targets and a ban on certain single-use plastic packaging types for unprocessed fresh fruit & veg, as well as food and drinks sold in restaurants.

Measures also include minimum recycled content targets for plastic packaging and minimum recycling targets by weight of packaging waste.

Different proposals come with different deadlines, but the majority will be fully implemented across all member states by 2030.

Senior industry figures have warned this will bring added complexities for Northern Ireland producers, who often need to abide by EU regulations as part of the Windsor Framework deal. The agreement between the UK and the EU upholds the bloc’s food safety standards while ensuring a smooth trade flow between NI and the Republic of Ireland, which are not separated by a physical border.

If the new packaging and recycling content rules are applied in Northern Ireland, products made in GB “would need to be labelled differently in NI if they are to be on sale there”, one source explained.

This is because they may end up crossing the border into the EU’s single market, where they need to abide by those rules.

“If there was a difference in [packaging] in GB and NI, that could costs us hundreds of millions of pounds a year,” the source said.

A similar dispute arose last year between the UK and the EU, which led to GB producers exporting to NI having to add a ‘Not for EU’ label to packs, to identify the goods that were meant to stay in Northern Ireland.

In many cases, this has forced GB manufacturers to have two different production and packaging lines, ramping up their costs by upwards of hundreds of millions a year, trade groups have said.

Gillian Garside Wight, consulting director for packaging sustainability consultancy firm Aura, said it was too early to know whether EU laws would overrule UK laws in Northern Ireland. Her current advice to clients is “to go with the most stringent rules for the territories they operate in”.

In NI, that means producers “will have to adjust their packaging to meet the EU requirements, and in some cases that isn’t consistent with the UK, so they would have to go with the most stringent requirement”.

For example, if single-use plastic is banned in Europe and not in the UK, producers “would have to eliminate it from their portfolio to comply with the EU”, she explained.

Another senior packaging lobbying figure said the EU labelling provisions had ”the potential to be very complicated, add costs, and not deliver the best environmental and economic outcomes we’d wish to see”.

One retail policy source added: ”It’s just another example of everyone trying to understand which legislation applies in Northern Ireland.

”It reads more like a strategy at the moment and we really need to know from government what pieces of legislation specifically will apply there, and hopefully more government support to ensure that compliance.”