The Return To Offender campaign sends items of identifiable marine litter found on UK beaches back to the manufacturers and distributors, challenging them to:
- Extended Producer Responsibility – Develop active and improved product stewardship strategies (Extended Producer Responsibility) to better protect the marine and wider environment from their products and associated packaging.
- Behavioural Change Campaigns – Support school education programmes & wider behavioural change campaigns to transform how the public buys, uses and consumes products.
- Reduce, Reuse & Recycle – Reduce the amount of unnecessary packaging used. Support and facilitate re-use and recycling, particularly at beach and coastal locations.
- Grassroots Conservation – Support grass roots marine conservation initiatives and beach clean activities.
- Environmental Impact Labels – Develop environmental impact icons and messaging to encourage recycling & better disposal.
We are calling for business-wide Extended Producer/Distributor Responsibility (EPDR) programmes for all products and packaging made and sold in the UK. We are calling for companies to develop active product stewardship strategies to better protect the marine and wider environment, reduce levels of litter whilst also ensuring greater sustainability and efficiency within the manufacturing process, and specifically to reduce or eliminate excess packaging wherever possible, preferably through more efficient design.
We believe that manufacturers should review how they design, produce and sell their products and associated packaging and reevaluate their supply chains to close the loop on litter entering the environment. The earlier potential waste and litter can be designed, engineered or eliminated from the manufacturing cycle, the smaller chance litter will enter the environment and the smaller the volume.
We also encourage manufacturers and retailers to support behavioural change campaigns to transform how the public buys, uses and consumes products, and better facilitating re-use and recycling. We also call for more support from businesses to fund and resource community driven marine conservation initiatives including voluntary beach cleans.
Our calls for businesses to be more proactive in waste, recycling and resource management at the beachfront, through better infrastructure development and improved collections systems.
We are also calling for enhanced labeling on single-use plastic packaging to include additional environmental impact messaging, alongside more prominent recycling information. We are calling for prominent icons and wording to be developed to convey environmental threats packaging can pose.