Name: The Future of Circularity & Recycling
Uploaded: 2026-02-24T16:16:06.577Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: The Future of Circularity & Recycling

Transcript for "The Future of Circularity & Recycling": Hello everyone, and welcome to the February webinar from our Sustainability Magazine monthly webinar series. My name is Charlie King and I am the senior editor of Sustainability Magazine. Today's session is called the future of circularity and recycling. Over the next forty five minutes or so, we are going to look at how to shift from recyclable to truly recycled, reduce fees and improve capture, secure, consistent food grade recycled material and identify where reuse and refill models can scale in the next twenty four to thirty six months. We're going to translate fast moving policy into practical design and supply chain decisions. So we've got a lot to get through, and I'm really pleased today to be joined by Fraser Macintosh, Head of External Affairs and Sustainability from Suntory Beverage and Food GB and I, and Ross Eisenberg, President of America's Plastic Makers. Fraser, Ross, thank you so much for being here. Before we jump into our discussion, I wondered if you could just start us off by giving a short introduction, a little bit about your career and your current role. Fraser, do you want to kick us off? Yeah, with pleasure and thanks for having me. So I work for ultimately a division of the Suntory Group, Japanese multinational company famous for its whiskies and bourbons, but also its approach to conservation of nature. I work in the soft drinks division here in The UK. So brands that hopefully your audience is aware of, Leukas Aid and Rybena, brands with almost one hundred years of history and heritage. My career, I spent ten years with Suntory, a year with the spirits group, but nine of those years really lucky looking at policy, sustainability and comms in soft drinks. Incredible. And Ross? My name is Ross Eisenberg. I am president of America's Plastic Makers. We are a division of the American Chemistry Council, is the largest and sort of the main trade association representing the chemical and the plastics industry in The United States. We do have a global reach. We essentially engage globally, federally here in The United States and then then at the state level and frankly even the local level. My career is I was an environmental lawyer by trade still kind of am but but got more into the policy and the lobbying side of things. What we do here is essentially we are the main representative for the industry in Washington doing lobbying, doing public affairs, doing communications, things like that on behalf of the industry. If you've seen the America's Plastic Makers ads, that is us and essentially trying to move the sustainability message for plastics forward as much as we possibly can. Incredible. I feel like you're both coming from really different backgrounds on this. So I'm excited for this conversation. So let's dive straight in. I want to start talking a little bit about designing for true circularity and recycling access. So what design choices lower extended producer responsibility fees and improved capture rates that you've seen? Fraser, do you want to start us off? Yeah, happily. And I guess, and I think lots of us would share this, you design for recyclability and sortation and If you get that right, then by nature, EPR, DOS all becomes much easier for your business. So, mean, our SPF GB and I, we spent about £12,000,000 in the last five, six years, shortening the sleeves of our bottles. Seems extreme amount of money for a relatively straightforward change, but it's significant. Both the change that we need to do in a factory, which is revamp machinery, invest in new slivers, It can be really expensive for every bottling line that we have. But the transformation that means at a materials recovery facility is that that sleeve, which typically in soft drinks covers a clear plastic bottle, is dramatically reduced in size and the facility can identify the clear plastic bottle beneath it. And then that plastic bottle is sent and sorted in the right location to be turned back into a new plastic bottle. Historically, with full length sleeves, that wasn't happening. So even if people were doing the right recycling behaviours and putting a bottle in a recycling bin, it could still end up in landfill. But that investment, that commitment changes. And now majority of our bottles, all of our bottles, when recycled properly, can be turned back into new bottles. Back to your question on an EPR, though I should point out soft drinks bottles will be exempt from extended producer responsibility in The UK because we have a deposit return scheme coming on stream in 2027. It would mean technically that because the bottle is clear, because the sleeve height is 50% of the bottle maximum, but EPR fees would be in the green eco modulation of the EPR fees because it's widely collected, easy to sort and can be reprocessed. So that gives you an idea of the investment, but also the change these kind of policies can drive. That's incredible. And in terms of recycling, feel like consumers feel like a lot of the onus is on them, but that actually is a strategy that takes it off them, I guess, a way. 100%. It's very, very clear that consumers want the right thing for the planet, but those aren't necessarily the signals and the drivers of choice. Its taste, its flavor, its price. Sustainability is often a consideration, but it's much further down the pecking order where consumers are hard pressed. So you have to make recycling the easiest thing possible for your consumer. Otherwise, time pressed, stressed, know, first pressure, they won't be able to do it. So absolutely, you have to make these choices so that the end point of recycling is achieved and it all comes back to benefit us. Ultimately, we're not sitting here saying we are an altruistic business. We grow for good. We do the right things. It means there is more recycled plastic available to us long term that we can put back into our bottles. So it's a really beneficial thing for planet, people and business. Incredible. Ross, what about you? Well, so The US very I mean, is somewhat behind The UK and even the rest of EU on recycling. We have EPR in seven states now, but it is new EPR. Know, places like California, who are the early adopters, it's really only been a few years and they're still putting out regulations to implement those systems. So we're seeing, I mean, just just early steps in terms of trying to get EPR up and running. And we'll see how many states even are able to do it. There's really maybe one that can get done this year and maybe a few more in the next few years, but it's not going as quickly. So there's a lot that you can do here, but at the end of the day, it's almost the same answer as what Fraser gave. It really is access, right? If you start with consistent access and system performance at the local level, then regardless of where the product is made, your outcomes are going to be better. You know, we really have in The US a completely outdated recycling infrastructure, both for collection for sortation, and then for the recycling itself. It's just it is it is 50 years old. It was designed for products that are different products than we have in the system now. Certainly not a lot of the advanced materials we have, and it just needs to be better. And so, that collection and sortation conundrum here would go leaps and bounds towards actually upgrading the infrastructure and doing better here. Other things that I think would matter would be really helpful and this is a place where technology can be helpful. Harmonize Europe's accepted materials listed labeling, both domestically internationally. Some of the amazing things that we're seeing that you can do with labels now that will help on the sortation side, that will help on the collection side. They're just we're not available the past few years have made big strides and there's a lot to be excited about. We want to see these EPR systems and again, because we are so new at this, designed to reward system outcomes, not just the design itself. So, you know, when you're doing eco modulation, tie it to what's really happening, not necessarily the sort of, you know, of what recyclability is like if that Styrofoam actually is getting recycled better. Okay, let's reflect that in the fees as they're going forward. Things like that will really, really help. We've got a long way to go here. And then that's before you even get to what I think is the most important thing for us, which is aligning internationally, right? You know, every time I travel overseas to the EU, the soft drinks have the bottle cap attached. We don't do that here, right? We're going to have to get to a point where there are global kind of standards and frameworks and everybody's doing the same thing so that we can can truly have a global system that works. I love that and I did want to touch on policy next. So what policies do you think would most improve that real world collection sorting and participation outcomes so that we're seeing recyclable packaging actually get recycled? Would you like me to take that one? I definitely as a starting point, so we are now four or five years into this process, but but we are inching closer to a global plastics agreement, with with actual binding rules, that the UN is working on, and, we remain close but not there. I'm hopeful that that negotiators will finish it this year, if not this year, maybe early next year. That would be a sea change both in terms of the the message that it would send here in The United States and elsewhere that this is something that the global community takes seriously, but also to help us move some of these policies forward. I mean, it is it's very difficult as a lobbyist, which is what I am, to tell Congress, to tell lawmakers that, you know, with all the things going on in their district, they should prioritize recycled content standards, they prioritize EPR. But having a global signal give me the ability to walk in there and say, hey, the rest of world is doing it. We need to do this too, would be tremendous. So starting there and and all the good things in that agreement would be really, really, really positive. Amazing Fraser, what about from your perspective? Yeah, I like much of what was said and just add that a harmonised and sequenced legislation is vital. Tendering, that touched on already, was a great policy and soft drinks producers in particular embraced it very quickly, introduced it. And those of us that were bound by EU legislation recognised the beauty of the legislation and introduced it across our non EU operations. So here in The UK, of Ireland, we're not bound by tethering, but it's the right thing to do. It improves circularity recycling. So we introduced it across the rest of operations. There were some social media consumer backlash, lots of memes, lots of complaints around how that lotto might just tickle your nose while you're eating a drink. But it's clear that consumers have got used to it. Now, what we do need though, is is proper joined up thinking policies. I know we'll come on to deposit return schemes I expect during the course of any conversation on circularity, but that is a really exciting piece of legislation that is a win win. But we need to join up across The UK for overseas listeners that perhaps won't understand the complexity of The UK, but we have certain devolved powers to other parts of The UK, nations within The UK. That mean that some of the nations, such as Wales, want to do a deposit return scheme differently, which means huge consumer confusion either side of a border where glass is in a scheme here, but not in a scheme five miles away. And what you absolutely need for consumers is which I've touched on earlier. You have to make it as simple as possible. So many of our consumers drink our drinks are be huge eco doers, but there was a significant subset that are not necessarily going to do everything they can within their power to achieve it. So let's please make a policy, design policy that makes the autoing rate come through to the consumer, make things as easy as possible. That's the key piece. We do have some other elements of policy in The UK that could do with improvement and simplification, applying value added tax VAT to bottled deposits going through a deposit return scheme makes zero sense. That's the government taxing its own piece of green legislation. So tweaks and improvements, but I am excited and we do embrace extended producer responsibility, deposit return schemes because of the potential impact it could have to industry, but also the countryside, the landscape and use of use of materials in this country. So go on Fraser, dig into for a little bit deposit return systems for me and the role of companies as well in that, I think. Yeah, so we love deposit return schemes. Honestly, if I touch on ultimately what it is or what they are, there are many successful versions of it across the world, but the best tend to have a very similar set of ideas. The basic principle, your product or soft drink typically, consumers pay for the soft drink, but then a deposit, sort of an additional cost at the point of purchase. So you buy your drink for £2 and then you have a 15p say imagined deposit and you get that deposit back if you take the empty container to a deposit return reverse vending machine. So yeah, precisely what it sounds like. It's a vending machine in reverse where you put in an empty bottle, scanning a barcode and you get your deposit back. So that's the basic premise. It means that suddenly a consumer that might have seen an empty container was disposable, thrown away, they don't value that material. Suddenly it's got a price attached to it and the behaviour changes dramatically. Where they saw waste, now see value, they would hold on to it, return it to a reverse vending machine and that can dramatically transform recycling rates in a country. We see recycling rates in some Scandinavian, Germany, I think upwards of 90%. The UK currently has a bottle recycling rate of about 8%. So you can see the dramatic opportunity for transformation there. And it is one of these win wins. It's an obvious win for Planet. Consumers, there's no cost to them provided they return the container. And obviously for companies like ours, that stimulates circularity, that creates a reliable supply of recycled plastic. So that reduces our emissions long term. It ought to reduce cost. That's probably a side discussion that we might talk about later, but you know, assets ultimately means there's a very genuine route to net zero for soft drinks bottles fully circular. Typically, and I'm sure there's lots to add and dive into, but typically what we see is it could be plastic, aluminium and sometimes glass in these deposit return schemes. So yeah, a bit of an overview and reasons why we think it's fantastic. In The UK, deposit return scheme is run by a company, by a deposit management organisation that itself is composed of all of those producers with skin in the game. So in The UK, the deposit return scheme will be all beverage containers of plastics and in cans, plastics and metal cans. So that means any alcohol producer, soft drinks producer selling beverages in The UK, typically we're invited to invest and become part of the DMO. So we're a significant funder in our DMO. We're about 7% market share and we're putting forward £45,000,000 in funding for the DMO. So you can extrapolate out from there just how much investment may be included. And we're just 7% share of the soft drinks industry. So we are all investors, have voting rights and we have a say and supporting role in making the deposit return scheme work. But it is a individually representative board that works through all those really complicated discussion and decision points in a DMO. So what the producer fee might be, what the retail handling fee, where those reverse vending machines are in supermarkets, what the supermarkets can charge to process that return to cover their costs, all those complicated decisions and what the deposit return cost is. Is it 15? Is it 20? All that complex modelling has to be done by the DMO to make it work. So that's hopefully not that short, but a bit of an overview of a DRS. As a UK resident, I'm certainly excited to have that available to me. I had the absolute pleasure of visiting Romania and experienced the DRS there and it was incredible to see in practice. Ross, you don't have anything quite like that in The US, am I right? But you do some there. There are some companies trialing some systems with plastic cut returns and things like that. You? Yeah, what's your angle on it? So there are bottle bills. There's a few states that have bottle bills and they've been in place for quite a while. But but that is certainly an area of emerging debate and, you know, again, a good idea is a good idea. And if it were, you know, if it starts working somewhere else, I think The US eventually kind of gets there. As you know, our politics are pretty divisive right now on everything. And so, you know, much much as the cases you have in The UK, where you have different jurisdictions doing different things. We've got 50 of them, and they're doing 50 different things. And, and it really does complicate things. I was literally in Albany, New York yesterday, where they're debating, you know, what could either be the most restrictive and frankly problematic, call it EPR bill. It's really not it just kind of bans everything, or a more flexible one that we think would be actually pretty promising and we're at a point where we just don't know what they're going to do. This is, you know, the fourth year they're doing it. And every state's kind of been doing that. And so what winds up happening and for again, just we have retailers in our membership as well and brands. If you have to do something for all 50 states, you want it to be the same. Right? I mean, you don't want to have to make 50 different types of packaging. And so you want to make sure that whatever you're producing will work in California or at the Walmart in Arkansas or somewhere else. And so that really is a conundrum for a lot of our folks. And so on the policy side, that's why we just have been advocating across the board for clear and predictable rules. And that makes such a difference. And, you know, companies need certainty around what's the permitting going to be for this? Can we get approved? Is, you know, are we going to be allowed to sell this package in the state? Is it going to conform to it? Will it be counted as recycled content if we put recycled content in it? Every state has a different answer to this question right now and it is creating significant confusion. The bulk of my job has been trying to get the federal government to step in and just say, look, here's some here's some straight predictable rules on what is recycled content, what you know, what these things are and so that we can actually have a system that starts to function properly. Because companies in The US must it must be a real challenge for them having to navigate all of those rules. Are you seeing there be buy in from those companies that it's going to affect to apply across the whole the whole country or you're not seeing that impact? I am. And I think a good question is it depends. There was there was significantly more excitement, I guess, for sort of, let's say, federal, national, executive producer responsibility a few years ago than there is now. Part of it is just the economic realities of it. It is not cheap. And the early entrants are are learning as they go. You had a couple more creative approaches from state to state, and and there's been some bumps in the road. Some of the early costs coming out of places like Oregon and Colorado are creating some sticker shock for, I think, lot of the companies that are that are engaged in it, particularly the small and medium sized businesses. So we'll learn from that. But that has, I think, well, the excitement over more and more more in terms of EPR around the country and it certainly put the debate here in Washington on hold about having national federal EPR. Now that doesn't mean that things can't be done right. We have been, you know, in this administration which is really committed to regulatory reform and trying to sort of streamline things. It's an opportunity for us to try to get some flexibility and some clear definitions on technologies to bring online. One of the things that we advocate for the most here is call it chemical recycling, we call it advanced recycling. But essentially, using chemistry to just as a means of recycling plastic and taking plastic from from existing plastic to new plastic, you know, than mechanical recycling. There really are not any streamlined definitions for The United States. And so essentially, we're seeing advanced recycling, chemical recycling pop up in places where they have good laws, Texas, Georgia, places like that, and not in places that there's just been significant NGO opposition or just a resistance to actually taking on the issue. And so we have this conundrum where places like Oregon and Maine and Minnesota are going to be needing it to meet their new EPR schemes, but they haven't really made up their mind on what the policy actually is. And so we're really asking this administration to try to solve that and say, this is how it's regulated. This is how you deal with the emissions. This is, you know, things that that UK and EU dealt with a long time ago. We're at the point of trying to get that in place right now. Incredible. That's quite quite the journey to go on on both sides of the pond, think, isn't there? Absolutely. And there's a point I think as well, modernizing the infrastructure, it sounds like you're both sort of gently touching on that but from very different perspectives. How are you finding that, Ross, in terms of a lobbying perspective on investment capital for that, for modernising infrastructure? So what we're seeing here in The United States is that capital is available for the actual recycling infrastructure. I was at an unveiling of a large flexible film mechanical recycling facility in Indiana a few months ago. I'm headed down to Texas tomorrow to go tour ExxonMobil's Baytown facility where they just added two more lines of chemical recycling onto an existing pyrolysis unit. The capital is there. Just like anything else in The United States, the enemy of bringing that capital online and getting it all together is time and permanent. Right? And so so, you know, the longer that these things take, the harder it is to get them up and running because you have to have all of the things locked in from the financing side and everything else. And so, just like permitting a Walmart or an electric utility or a gap pipeline, permitting an advanced recycling facility is rife with uncertainty and a mechanical recycling facility is rife with uncertainty and kind of governmental bureaucratic kind of nightmares. So the bulk of my job in these instances is trying to fix that problem. That is why you have lobbyists like us. It's slow moving, but there is a recognition that you can do it better here and we see some opportunities to streamline that process. Fraser, you mentioned a little bit about the investment that it's taking from from companies like Suntory towards DRS. Is that all of the way there? Is there more push needed? And are there other areas of opportunity for investment in recycling and circularity in The UK and beyond? There's so many themes to pick up on from what Watson is saying just very briefly. Regulatory certainty, government certainty is so vital. So we saw that the deposit return schemes I've talked about so glowingly, so positively, initially Scotland in The UK was to go it alone. That scheme would be ended it spectacularly badly with a loss of a lot of money. The Internal Markets Act, kind of a decision making protocol from the UK government decided to block Scottish deposit return scheme from going ahead. But it meant investment was totally lost and that signal didn't help confidence for private investment long term when we need private investment for deposit return schemes. So much improved now, we have UK's DEFRA very committed to deposit return scheme, really strong signals which gives us and investors greater confidence that this will go ahead. So it could be more important to send the right signals with the right policy and to go in a harmonised way. Back to your question around investment, the big challenge that we face actually is capacity for processing of plastics seems to be falling. Capacity for processing, recycling and plastics is falling across the EU right now because the economics of recycled PET don't seem to be stacking up. You talked or we have talked about plastics packaging tax and how that is a positive thing. There is a in The UK, I think it's about £250 a tonne of plastics levied on brands that are using less than 30% recycled plastic in their bottles. We've never had to pay the plastic packaging tax because operate at a really high PET inclusion rate in packaging. But what is true, when we choose to buy recycled plastics for our bottles, it is about 80% more expensive than fossil fuel plastic. Those economics do not stack up if you want a future in which packaging is circular. So we need things, we need investment, we need things from government to show that recycled PET is absolutely the future and those investments in plastics reprocessing capacity will be supported and ultimately profitable for those companies. So there is still work to do on some significant areas so that other companies step up and invest in recycled plastic. I feel like we've talked quite a lot about the recycled packaging and the deposit schemes. What about like reuse and refill systems? Where are the positives, negatives? Where do they beat each other out? Where are the benefits for each different type? Ross, do want to start us off? Sure. Reuse and refill. So the way that this comes up in The United States is very interesting. A lot of the NGOs here will cite that as the first, second and third option for solving plastic waste. And and it is obviously in the, you know, the higher the waste hierarchy, it is near the top, but it is not the only option. And so we wind up in this sort of strange debate here over reuse, refill versus recycling when the answer is both. And so but the challenge that we have here is that today's packaging and waste management infrastructure really wasn't built for reuse. It was it was built, at least in The US, for products to be discarded at the end of their life and or recycled at the end of their life. And so that creates a lot of uncertainty. And so you have to change behaviors around, you know, change behaviors and change infrastructure around reuse, refill. One of the challenges we have here is we don't necessarily learn from our mistakes all that well, right? We sort of do it one way and then we stay with it and and you know, even in the face of maybe changing data on how it's working. A really great example of that is bags, right? So for the past ten years, a lot of the legislation really locally, whether it's been New York City or Hilton Head, South Carolina, have been essentially banning plastic bags for takeout or for at the supermarket or things like that. And almost every study that has looked at the impact of that basically comes to the same conclusion, which is that now that they've been replaced with the thicker bags, you're actually making the problem worse. Right. And a great example of that is me. I didn't take my car today because there's snow everywhere. So I'm going to take the train home. If I stop at the supermarket, I don't have a bag. And so if I purchase one of those bigger plastic bags, I'm probably going to just do that again. So we have to learn from these things. Right. They are good for some consumers. They are not good for other consumers. What are we learning from it? How are we how are we being flexible around it? We're seeing that urban areas tend to do better on reuse, refill because you have sort of the confluence of design and retailer engagement and consumer behavior, much like the vending machines that we talked about earlier. You can see that working in an urban environment better. But we just have to be flexible to it and understand, number one, that is not the only answer. It is a giant piece of the puzzle, but not the only of the puzzle. But just we have to sort of be able to find that sweet spot on reuse and refill and then learn from it and scale that up rather than just jamming, you know, as we say it here, square peg in a round hole. You can't fix everything with it. So flexibility is a bit of the name of the game there. Fraser, what's your perspective? Yeah, it's so true. Was said in terms of believing without that evidence approach or pilots or proper pilots in place that a reuse solution is going to work for everything. I'd argue and we have this, we have a part of the Centauri group, our operations across Spain for example. For lots of our drinks in the sort of out of home channel, restaurants and bar channel, we have a really formidable, really successful circular glass system we already have quite a closed operating environment. Bars often will distill from drinks and pour out the glass into glass, into barware, they're observative. They keep on to that glass and it stays behind the bar. It never really goes to the consumers, stays in their hands, it can get recycled, it's returned to us in the same crates in which we delivered it as part of the back haul for delivery drivers. When the delivery driver comes to drop off new drinks, picks up the old ones and then brings it back to our facility where we wash it, sterilise it, refill it. There is a brilliant closed loop and a very clear argument for reusable glass and a proven system where that all works and we know we get the required turns on the glass. So for instance, the glass typically goes through seven, eight turns. So actually from a carbon impact largely it works. But there is a big push to make, say, plastic reuse a viable, realistic premise in parts of The UK in the next couple of years. And we're not there. That would require retrofitting factories with washing facilities where we're constrained for space. There's so much work we need to be doing, whether that's standardising or investing in washing hubs and working through those back call routes that don't exist in other models to make it work. So exactly really, as Ross says, just because it works in one area, one location does not mean it's going to be, you can just lift and drop and it works elsewhere. So there are absolutely environments where it works brilliantly. And I think that bar example is perfect. It doesn't mean it's necessarily something you can spread across the rest of the charities, other markets, other channels. So we must have evidence approaches, we must do pilots, proper LCAs on the materials to prove their works before investing the hundreds of millions of pounds it requires to make it viable and scalable. Feels like almost another layer to this policy challenge because you need that flexibility, but you also need that standardization. Yeah. Okay, what about concentrates, durable dispensers, refill packs, that side of the argument? Where do you stand on that? What are the challenges? What are the benefits? What's the future? Very briefly about PPWR, if helpful. So broadly, it's a European Union piece of legislation that sets out targets on reuse refill in retailers. And the first thing to say is it's a refill reuse across certain categories, soft drinks included, by 2030. So 10% of not shop space, it's more sales or volume, I believe 10% of sales volume of those categories into Refill Reuse. But the responsibility is on the final distributor. So that's really the retailer. So it will be the retailer that sets up how that might work. And there will be, I'd imagine, certain liquids, certain concentrates that are far easier to do a dispense method and a refill method than others. Carbonates probably quite difficult. How do you make sure that that carbonation isn't wasted when you try to refill it? It's like how messy and sticky that could be if anyone's ever fizzed up a bottle and opened it on their lap. So should start to see what the reality is. The longer term ambition much, much higher by 2040 and the responsibility shifts to producers. So the legislation is calling for fairly dramatic change. I'll come back to Ross's point and some of the things I've said earlier though, actually a deposit return scheme to my mind sets out an entirely net zero future for the Bastic Bottle. So trying to harmonise those and making sure it's done together, we will have had a chance to evaluate what's going on with deposit return scheme. The very final point on that is we just need to check how are deposit return schemes working, how are other schemes and a curbside is working before we start introducing requiring infrastructure to introduce a reuse refill that might be no better from a carbon carbon point of view. That is vital to me that we we check, react, evidence approaches before implementing something brand new. I feel like we've already touched on quite a lot of this, but I do want to round out with what logistical and policy barriers exist today that make it hard to scale these reuse and refill models and what are the fixes? Ross, I feel like policy we'll start with you. Well, mean, it's the confluence and we've talked about it a bunch today of economics and the reality of consumers actually wanting to do it and it working, you know, and being able to do it consistently from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. You know, we have in The United States we have literally 7,000 different municipalities doing 7,000 different things. And so that makes it really really difficult to get anything consistently from place to place. And that is before you get into the philosophy, the politics, the everything and then just the fact that that my friends that live in Louisiana just do things a lot differently than I do here in Washington DC. So, you know, the answers for us are always, you know, take it one step higher. What can the government do in general? What can the federal government do in terms of settings and national, you know, guidelines, standards, best practices to help municipalities do things consistently. Because we do think that is a good federal role in this in this debate. You take it one step higher and that is a place where where the global governments can get together and do something similar to really help help move all of these things. I can say that reuse and refill is part of the global plastics agreement. It is it is a component of it just like design for recyclability and waste waste access and all of these things, which is why I keep coming back to why it's such a good idea. And so, you know, starting there, every nation's going to have to do it a little bit differently. The Bahamas obviously is in a much different economic and kind of infrastructure place than Kenya than The UK than Japan and The US. But it can make so much of a difference, which is why we are so committed to trying to get The US to the table, but also all governments to the table to get a final global plastics agreement in place. And Fraser, what's your perspective? What about the logistical and policy barriers? No, but it's an echo of what Ossie shared. We need governments to be joined up and not just at a national level, a regional level, Not just so that simple for companies to follow and operate. You know, the vast amount of change required to deliver these things, ultimately so the consumer can follow it clearly and it falls through to the consumer. When you're working somewhere or when you're travelling for work, everything, your recycling behaviours are the same. The materials, it's the same process, it's the same rules that apply. Really harmonisation, consistency and of course a long term signal letting us governments can let us know what their plans are so that we have time to react and introduce it effectively. Quite simple really when it comes down to it. Quite simple, I'm not sure, but I'm excited to see where it goes and I'm hopeful despite the fact that we haven't seen that treaty or anything come through yet. But I'm also looking forward to a DRS in The UK, so we shall see. We haven't got long left together, but I have had a question through that I hope I think maybe might come to you first, Fraser, and then you Ross, if that's okay. How are plastic packaging taxes like The UK plastic packaging tax actually influencing decisions around resin choice, labeling and things like colour? It's not not. PPT doesn't influence a great deal. PPT is a big driver on making sure we sure we use enough recycled plastic in our in our bottles. Unfortunately, we were way ahead of the curve with Rybena that's been using 100% recycled plastic since 2007. It's more, it's EPR that drives the right design choices. All of those pieces you talked about in terms of whether it's adhesives or the color of the plastic or the size of the sleeve. EPR drives all of the right choices because it has an eco modulator, a RAM, really giving a green, amber, red sort of award to your packaging. If you're on amber, you pay the base fee. If your packaging is red, so it's full sleeve or it can't be processed or it isn't collected at scale, it receives a red and a multiplier on that base fee. If you're good as gold, your packaging is widely collected, perfectly recycled and circular, you receive a green, which is a discount on that base fee. It's a really well, I say well, broadly well designed piece of legislation that drives all of the right packing choices from producers like ours. So the EPR, I would argue, is the one driving all of that positive change and then penalties for those that don't get it right. I completely agree. The debate here in The United States around and we don't have a plastic packaging in The United And I'm grateful for that because anytime we put a tax in place here in The United States, we typically don't actually take proceeds of that tax and apply it to what it's supposed to go to. And so usually goes to the general treasury. We have one on us on the chemical industry called the super fund tax that has to deal with them that, you know, toxic waste. And, you know, they use it for pizza parties and things like that. So there's no guarantee. There's never a guarantee that the the money that's coming in that we are that the we the industry would be bearing the burden of paying will actually go to what it's for, which is why as Fraser said, EPR is the answer. Right? So and we as an industry are lobbying for it because we are comfortable with a financial burden, but we just have to make sure that it's going to fixing the things that actually will modernize the system and make it cheaper in the long run. Access to infrastructure, you know, access to collections rotation, new modern modernizing the recycling infrastructure, all these things. So much as as you guys have concluded over there, you know, EPR is the answer and we think it is the best option here. We're a little further behind, but but we're certainly having that conversation rather than a resin tax conversation. Amazing. I think we are going to have to wrap up. Ross and Fraser, this has been such an incredible conversation. I feel like we've covered loads. But do you have anything to add before we wrap up? I'm happy to jump in on that one. So I've said it a number of times on a broken record, but my call to action to everybody and this is the great thing about having two countries, you know, sort of doing this together. Our countries are not united on this issue in the global sort of framework. Frankly, there's a number of places where we don't agree. What I would encourage you all to do is talk to your government and say, hey, go to the table now, get together with some of those other large nations with The US, with Japan, Korea, with the EU government and actually find those areas of confluence and try to solve this problem before you all get back together at the end of the year for the next UN conference. Those UN conferences tend to be pretty wild. But what winds up happening is they finally actually have the hard conversation too late. So let's use this time to get the adults in the room and actually work these out now. I believe that this can happen, but it's going to take really a lot of initiative from our government to actually try to break down those barriers. Fraser, what about you? Brilliant. I'm going to take Ross's script. I'm going take what Ross is pleased to global frameworks and governments and share that with UK governments. We need Wales, Scotland, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland and then also the Republic Fund plus the EU to really be talking together to make sure that we have that clarity for producers that delivers that simplicity and consistency for consumers. So yeah, that's an echo of Rossi's just more locally. Completely agree. Incredible. Thank you so much to both of you for joining me. I am afraid that is all we have time for, but I'm looking forward to digging more into your insights in the future. I'm sure to our audience. The recording of this webinar will be available shortly. So if you desire, you can come back, watch it all again, rewrite your notes and really pay attention to all of those details that we've dug into. You can also catch more webinars like this over on the Sustainability Magazine website. Just head to sustainabilitymag.com. Thank you everyone for watching. Thank you again, Ross and Fraser so much for joining me. Bye for now.