Cutting plastic can cut your costs

Where cutting plastic pays now

The most detailed global model of plastic pollution found that measures which reduce plastic use are the most attractive economically, often a net saving, while swapping plastic for another material is the most expensive option (Pew Charitable Trusts and Systemiq, Breaking the Plastic Wave, 2020). In practice that means three places where the money is:

• Remove what you do not needSecondary film, oversized boxes, plastic windows, single-serve sachets. Every tonne you stop buying is a tonne you no longer pay for, ship, tax or throw away. No new supplier is needed.
• Reuse inside your own wallsDishes for on-site dining, crates and totes between your own sites and regular suppliers. The container never leaves your control, so there are no return costs. A review of cost studies found reusable transport packaging cheaper than single-use in most cases, including a nearly 20% cut in packaging costs for returnable produce crates (IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, 2024).
• Join shared reuse at scaleIn a large shared system, returnable drink bottles cost 6% less per use than single-use and personal-care bottles 10% less; with a plastic tax and a higher carbon price added, returnable drink bottles could cost 28% less (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2023, modelled). The Foundation puts the opportunity from moving 20% of plastic packaging to reuse at US$10 billion.

The rising cost of staying with plastic

Governments are putting a price on plastic packaging through taxes and extended producer responsibility (EPR) fees, which make producers pay for collecting and recycling what they sell. The rates below are the published figures; plastic is charged far more than paper, glass or metal.

HM Revenue and Customs; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2025 base fees; PackUK, year 2 illustrative fees; Spanish Tax Agency; Italian Customs and Excise Agency: Italy’s plastic tax law and delay to 2027; European Commission and European Parliamentary Research Service (2028 proposal); Circular Action Alliance, Oregon and Colorado fee schedules; Recycle BC 2026 fee schedule; Australian scheme prices from Exchange for Change (New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory), VicReturn, Container Exchange (Queensland), WARRRL (Western Australia, price from August 2025) and TasRecycle

Australia. There is no national tax or per-tonne fee on plastic packaging yet. Drink suppliers pay the state container deposit schemes for each container (table above), and brand owners pay the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation a flat membership fee set by turnover, from $653 to $340,010 a year for 2026–27 (excluding goods and services tax), however much plastic they use. Membership is required above $5 million turnover (fee schedule). The federal government consulted on packaging reform in 2024; as of September 2026 it says no decision has been made and the current arrangement remains in place (Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water). We will add any new national fees here when they are announced. These charges are per container or flat, not per tonne. The calculator below includes them under “Australia”: the container price falls when you sell fewer containers, but not when you switch plastic for glass or cans, which cost about the same, and the membership fee stays the same however much plastic you use.

European Union. Since 2021, every European Union country pays €0.80 into the European Union budget for each kilogram of plastic packaging waste it does not recycle. The European Commission has proposed raising this to €1 per kg from 2028, then indexing it to inflation. In 2023 it raised €7.2 billion, 4.0% of the European Union’s total revenue (European Court of Auditors, Special report 16/2024, PDF, 2.9 MB; CC BY 4.0). Governments pay it, not businesses, so it is not in the calculator. But it gives them a direct reason to cut plastic packaging waste, and several also have, or plan, their own plastic taxes on businesses: Spain and Italy (above), and Germany, whose government said in April 2026 that it will introduce a plastic levy (German Federal Government, in German). Details have not yet been published.

Canada. Canada has no national packaging fee. Instead, most provinces make producers pay for recycling household packaging. British Columbia’s rates are in the table above and in the calculator: in 2026 a business pays 1.84 Canadian dollars for every kilogram of plastic film it sells to households, and 4.07 dollars per kilogram for foam. Saskatchewan and Quebec also publish their fees. Ontario’s producer responsibility organisations do not publish their fees, which they share only with registered producers, so we cannot show an Ontario rate.

Worked example. A UK company placing 100 tonnes of virgin plastic household packaging on the market a year could face about £22,900 in Plastic Packaging Tax and £42,300 in packaging fees at current rates: around £65,000 a year, before the cost of the plastic itself and its disposal. Each tonne removed saves about £650. This is our calculation; the tax and the fee can fall on different businesses in the same supply chain.

Work out your own exposure

Enter where you sell and how much plastic packaging you use, or, in Australia, how many drink containers. The calculator uses the rates in the table above and shows each charge with its source. The result is an estimate, not a quote.

Legal risk. Expected liabilities from plastic-pollution lawsuits in the United States between 2022 and 2030 exceed US$20 billion, with a 1-in-100 chance of passing US$100 billion (Minderoo Foundation, 2022, preliminary). Most of that falls on polymer and chemical makers, but brands face growing claims about recyclability.

Where it doesn’t pay yet

Being honest about this is what makes the rest believable.

• Swapping one throwaway material for anotherPaper, compostable or bio-based single-use items usually cost more than plastic, and are not automatically better for the environment. Substitution is the most expensive route in the global modelling. Use it last, where removing or reusing is not possible.
• Small reuse schemes run aloneFragmented or small-scale return systems are unlikely to match single-use on cost, and returnables for fresh food were about 25% more expensive in the same modelling (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2023). Joining a shared scheme is usually the answer.
• Reuse that needs new equipmentAdelaide Zoo’s café replaced plastic milk bottles with taps and reusable kegs. It avoided more than 4,000 bottles in four months, but needed an A$20,000 fit-out, co-funded by the milk supplier, and its milk costs rose slightly (Green Industries SA, 2024, operator-reported).
• Swapping to single-use alternatives in cafésIn Noosa, Queensland, cafés that went plastic-free paid about A$6,847 a year more for non-plastic items, leaving them about A$6,500 a year worse off after other costs and savings. The community still gained A$4.33 for every dollar invested, mostly from less litter (SC Lennon & Associates for the Queensland Government, summarised by the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office, 2021; modelled over 40 years).
• Some healthcare reusablesA peer-reviewed study found reusable surgical gowns cut 30,570 pounds of waste a year for a saving of about US$2,762: no cost penalty, but not a money-maker (JAMA Network Open, 2023).

Making the numbers work

1. Remove before you replace: it is the only step with no cost at all.
2. Count the full cost of the plastic you use: purchase, freight, taxes, packaging fees and disposal. The rates above rise every year.
3. Start reuse where containers stay in your control, then join shared schemes for anything that leaves your site.
4. Time material switches to fee changes: hard-to-recycle packaging attracts the highest fees.