EDITOUR PETplanet Insider Vol. 23 No. 01+02/22 www.petpla.net 12 in Wales and England. Specialist and premium gins have become a trend in the spirits market. The overwhelming majority of spirits and wines are packaged in glass. Although consumption at home increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK hospitality industry was very hard hit by shutdowns in 2020 and 2021. Many pubs, cafes and restaurants shut their doors permanently after a series of lockdowns and restrictions. The pub trade newspaper, the Morning Advertiser, reported that six pubs a week had closed from March 2020 to May 2021. This number has since been revised upwards; Sky News reported on 22 January 2021 that 10,000 licensed premises – pubs, clubs, cafes and restaurants - closed permanently during 2020, with a net reduction of just under 6000, when new openings were taken into account. Brexit and ‘Global Britain’ The impact of Brexit has been far less although, as the pandemic retreats in the UK, producers are becoming more concerned about export markets. Trade with with the EU has fallen since the UK formally left, on January 31, 2020, but activity with other parts of the world have risen, quite significantly, in some cases. It is being actively supported by the UK Government’s ‘Global Britain’ campaign. The USA’s relaxation of a trade embargo on whisky has seen a recovery in sales to America. Environment In Mintel’s Soft Drinks survey, 62% of adults cited plastic pollution among their top five environmental concerns. CocaCola Great Britain (now part of CocaCola Europacific Partners) announced in 2021 that all plastic bottles of 500ml and less for brands including Coca Cola, Coca Cola Zero Sugar, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Dr Pepper and Lilt will be made of 100% recycled plastic. The new bottles are easy to spot; they have been lightly coloured in a translucent shade of dark green. The Packaging Federation maintains that modern packaging and distribution methods in the UK enable food wastage in the supply chain to be at very low levels – just three per cent, compared to more than 40% in Russia/India and other countries. While demand for packaging is directly linked to consumer demand for products, developments in packaging in recent years have seen a decoupling of packaging growth from GDP growth in Britain. In the last ten years, the amount of packaging per person used in the UK has remained virtually unchanged while, in the same period, GDP and household expenditure have grown by some 20%. End of life packaging represents less than 20% of total household waste and below three per cent of unrecovered waste to landfill. Even that can be recovered; the UK has several energy-from-waste schemes that mine for and extract methane and other usable products from landfill sites. Proper, circular economy recycling of PET still lags behind aluminium and ferrous metals in the UK. Aluminium cans are now nearly 100% closedloop; virtually no virgin aluminium goes to food and beverage cans. While households are exhorted to sort waste and to recycle as much as possible, there is still a lot of potential. According to WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, UK plastic film recycling capacity was estimated to be just over 205k tonnes in 2020. Rigid plastic packaging recycling capacity was estimated at 440k tonnes in 2020; it could rise by nearly 300k tonnes by 2025, if all plans come to fruition. The UK is seeking to increase domestic capacity to recycle and reuse plastic waste and is consulting on policies to improve the quality of recovered plastic and create demand for recycled plastics. The market for recovered and recycled plastics is likely to continue to grow over the next 5–10 years. 338 124 25 599 266 34 7 53 286 229 92 111 93 24 1 6 Source & copyright by: WRAP Plastics Market Situation Report 2021 Consumer plastic packaging placed on the market by format and polymer 2019 (in 1,000 t) Source & copyright by: WRAP Plastics Market Situation Report 2021 Non-consumer plastic packaging placed on the market by format and polymer 2019 (in 1,000 t)
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