There was a charmingly simple idea behind Britain’s Plastic Packaging Tax.
Plastic waste is bad. Recycling is good. Therefore, tax plastic packaging containing too little recycled material and companies will eventually use more recycled plastic.
Perhaps, in some distant utopia, the tax would work so magnificently that there would hardly be anything left to tax.
Unfortunately, governments have a curious relationship with successful taxes: they generally prefer them to continue generating money.
Britain’s Plastic Packaging Tax brought HMRC £250 million in 2025–26. The previous year it generated £261 million. Not enormous by government standards, admittedly, but enough to make plastic waste look slightly more attractive when viewed through the windows of the Treasury.
The tax started at £200 per tonne in 2022. It is now £228.82.
Inflation, apparently, affects plastic pollution too.
And now Britain has discovered an even more sophisticated environmental technology: accounting.
From April 2027, chemically recycled plastic will be allowed to qualify under a “mass balance” system.
Mass balance is wonderfully modern because the recycled molecules do not necessarily have to end up in the particular piece of packaging claiming the recycled content. Recycled and virgin feedstocks can enter the same industrial system, and certified accounting determines how the recycled share is allocated.
In other words, we have progressed from recycling plastic to recycling certificates.
Final
The purpose of the legislation was supposedly simple: reduce plastic waste and encourage recycling.
Four years later, it has also become a reliable source of tax revenue — complete with rising rates, certification schemes and increasingly sophisticated accounting rules.
Long live bourgeois Bolshevism: bad governance at a very high tax rate.
So one day in Britain, a public official will move the recycled content from Column B to Column C — and the planet will finally be able to sleep peacefully.
Source
Preparing to use a mass balance approach for Plastic Packaging Tax
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/preparing-to-use-a-mass-balance-approach-for-plastic-packaging-tax