Debunking Benefit 4: The £1 Billion We “Saved” by Walking Away from Environmental Power
Why celebrating the absence of a fee misses the far bigger cost of stepping outside Europe’s environmental framework.
We are now on our fourth debunk of 75 Benefits of Brexit - and it is getting… weird. Also, a bit hard.
Not because the arguments and benefits posed by Mr Foyle are unimpeachable (nothing of the sort, they are, in fact, very peachable), but because I’m beginning to come to the realisation that the real challenge of creating this series of 75 articles isn’t going to be the volume of the claims, but rather the overwhelming sameness of them.
Each claim tends to have the same motif, set of omissions and the same sneakiness, and if I’ve learnt anything from the first three chapters, its that you really can turn nearly anything into a “Brexit Benefit” if you strip away enough of the context around the subject.
And Foyle’s fourth claim really does push this to a new level. The claim itself reads that:
The EU introduced another source of funds to top-up their budget, over and above core contributions. This source of funds is based on the amount of plastic produced by a member state and not recycled but does not go towards combatting non-recycled plastics. This money is better off staying in the UK1.
The way this is set up has been pretty unexpectedly fascinating - not because the subject matter is massively compelling (it is, after all, a tax on non-recycled plastic, a subject that makes even the CBAM chapter feel titilating), but because I’m now starting to pick up on what I suspect are the internal mechanics of Brexit propoganda in a way that I didn’t fully appreciate before I started using my stick to poke at Foyle’s “benefits.” It really is coming across that there is a method into what appears to be ignorance and / or guile at first glance, and once you spot it, it becomes very hard to miss.
But back to the detail of the fourth benefit in this veritable saga - Foyle in this chapter claims that the UK, thanks to Brexit, dodged a monstrous new levy introduced by the EU in 20212. The specific mechanism here is a €0.80 charge for every kilogram of plastic packaging that an EU member state produces, but fails to recycle.
In the narrative that he’s created around this “benefit”, this would have cost the UK a whopping €1.12bn in 2021 and a neat €2.9bn over the first three years. On top of this he also insists that the money doesn’t fund recycling, ocean clean up or anything really meaningful, and it goes straight into that very same Brussels-based debt-furnace we were introduced to in our second debunk.
Looking at this, it really feels like it comes down to another one of Mr Foyles favourite rhetorical devices - the EU launches a Tax Grab, and the UK has yet again bravely escaped this like the plucky, heroic island nation that Nigel Farage like’s everyone to believe we are.
But then I have to do that thing.
That thing that people really hate when they have a nice story.
I ask questions.
Questions like:
Why was the levy introduced in the first place?
What does it sit alongside?
What happens when you step back two feet and look at the whole system this forms part of instead of just looking at one isolated contribution?
Which is usually, in my experience, when the ground gives way a little bit. Because this claim is a great example of what I think we can call the “shrinking-frame trick”, in which someone takes a vast, very complex, interconnected policy ecosystem and crops it down until all that’s left is a single line item, floating sadly in mid-air with zero context, history, purpose and no real relationship to anything around it. You’re basically shrinking down the frame so tightly that even people who are intelligent forget that they’re just looking at the corner of a painting rather than a painting itself and being told to believe they see the whole, and only, picture available.
Which is where the EU plastic levy that Mr Foyle is so glad we’ve avoided comes in - because the levy itself is not a standalone tax of any real sort, it’s one tile in what has become a pretty vast mosaic. It sits within the much bigger circular economy framework3 that the EU has spent decades constructing - directives on packaging, extended producer responsibility, bans on single-use plastic, recycling-rate targets, wast-export restrictions and a regulatory apparatus that has managed to shape the behaviour of some of the largest and most influential manufacturers in the world. It is, in different terms, a tool of scale, and one that only works because the EU as a market is big and powerful enough to wield it.
Which is exactly the point where there is an environmental irony that comes in here, because while Foyle is fixating on a £1-billion-ish levy we have heroically avoided, he doesn’t once mention a far more significant reality that actually happened:
The UK must now comply to large part of this environmental framework anyway4 - but this time, we have to do so, because of our exit, without a seat at the table.
And why do we have to do it? To keep trading with the market of 450 million people5 right next door to us. It’s as simple as that. The EU sets the standard, because they hold the power, and we as a far smaller company and market size, follow the rules.
What’s even more illuminating about this situation though is that we have introduced our own plastic packaging tax - at a rate of £200 per tonne for packaging that contains less than 30% recycled content6, a tax which is really quite strikingly similar in logic to the EU levy. It’s a tax that we put in place because, like pretty much every other modern state on planet earth, we recognise that environmental incentives, when done well, actually work7.
More inconveniently for Foyle though is that the existence of our own UK tax undermines his argument of “Evil-Tax-Grabbing-Brussels putting pointless taxes on everything”, because if the EU’s tax is inherently pointless, ideologically objectionable and environmentally meaningless then… well, so is ours.
Beyond the issue that the EU and UK have both introduced very similar taxation on the same problem, there’s another little fly in the ointment here when it comes to our implementation - and that comes down to the fact that this sort of environment policy only really works at scale.
Plastic pollution is not an island problem, oceans don’t respect borders and supply chains are not patriotic. A levy that nudges a continent increases recycled content globally, a bloc-wide standard forces manufacturers everywhere from Tokyo to Toronto to change how they design packaging. That’s not deadweight bureaucracy, that’s geopolitical leverage, authority and influence.
Of which the UK now has precious little of all three all down to, you guessed it, Brexit.
Yes, it’s true that we can now write our own rules, meaning that we can be as environmentally ambitious as we want - but that ambition without scale is about as useful as a crochet condom, and what we’ve found in practice is that our regulators now spend half their time shadowing EU rules anyway on the basis they don’t want British exporters left out of one of the biggest markets in the world8, while the other half of their time is spent firefighting the issues caused by trying to diverge in ways that are entirely symbolic yet create enormous bureaucracy at the same time.
It borders on farcical really - we left the EU to “take back control,” and now, because of the way reality works, we now have even less control than we used to in especially the area of environmental policy.
Another point that’s worth adding here is that the UK’s environmental infrastructure is, to put it politely, struggling. Our recycling rates have stagnated in most cases and in others have fallen. Waste exports have risen9 while domestic infrastructure is patchy and underfunded. Councils are struggling (with pretty much everything, yes, but environmentally, especially) and the environmental watchdog that we created to replace the European Commission’s oversight has about the same number and sharpness of teeth as OfCom - that is to say, none and blunt.
While we’re here on our island hobbling along terribly bravely, the EU is ploughing billions upon billions into circular economy programmes while at the same time tightening waste-export restrictions and enforcing continent-wide standards.
Is their environmental system perfect? Absolutely not - but at least it exists, while ours are still trying to figure out where it left its keys.
And this is exactly why Foyle forces your eye to the tiny little frame that only shows part of the picture, because it doesn’t help his cause when you see the whole story - and that whole story creates a truth that is incompatible with what the mythology of Brexit is built upon:
When you shrink your regulatory footprint, the world does not shrink with you - it simply moves on without you.
The last untangling left in this is the cost. Not the €1bn odd or so that Foyle fixates on, but the actual cost - the economic value of finding yourself sitting outside of the largest regulatory power in the world, the cost of the loss of that influence and the loss of market shaping ability. The cost of the loss of predictability for British business and the loss of investment when companies look at Europe’s stability and Britain’s improvisation and, for the sake of stable risk tables, choose the larger, steadier, established partner.
Going into the realm of hypotheticals, you could even argue that the EU plastic levy, had we remained, would have helped rather than hindered the United Kingdom - that it would have increased pressure to reduce waste while aligning us with the dominant regulatory force in our region. It could have reduced the environmental and fiscal costs of plastic pollution over time, and, probably most importantly, it would have sat alongside EU funding to modernise waste infrastructure - funding we no longer receive.
And yet, chapter four of 75 Benefits of Brexit has Foyle celebrating the absence of a fee as a “benefit” while completely ignoring the disappearance of an entire system that made much needed environmental progress achievable in the first place.
Which is where I’m realising now that this series is leading me as well. As I write these debunks, I’m beginning to gain an understanding that Brexit wasn’t just a rejection of the EU - it was the rejection of systems. A refusal or incapability of acknowledging interdependence. An unshakeable belief that sovereignty means isolation and insulation instead of collaboration in a political culture that finds it easier to cheer the avoidance of a levy than to actually grapple with the cost of abandoning an environmental framework that actually worked.
Plastic, as it were, was never the point. Neither was money really. The point was walking away from systems that helped us - and convincing ourselves that this has made us freer, instead of less capable, influential and powerful.
This is part four of a longer project - seventy-five pieces in total - looking at what happens when Brexit “benefits” are examined one at a time, with the full context left in place. If you do want to support that work, a paid subscription helps enormously, though it’s never expected.
A one-off coffee is welcome too
And a share is always appreciated.
Thank you, as ever.
Foyle, Gully. 75 Brexit Benefits: Tangible Benefits from the UK Having Left the European Union (p. 39). (Function). Kindle Edition.
European Commission. (2021). Plastics own resource. [online] Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/eu-budget/long-term-eu-budget/2021-2027/revenue/own-resources/plastics-own-resource_en [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
Environment. (2025). Circular Economy. [online] Available at: https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy_en [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
Jamison, O., Kahmann, S. and Agnieszka Skorupinska (2024). Plastics and packaging laws in the European Union. [online] Cms.law. Available at: https://cms.law/en/int/expert-guides/plastics-and-packaging-laws/european-union [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
Europa.eu. (2024). Population and population change statistics - Statistics Explained - Eurostat. [online] Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_and_population_change_statistics [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
HM Revenue & Customs (2021). Plastic Packaging Tax: steps to take. [online] GOV.UK. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/check-if-you-need-to-register-for-plastic-packaging-tax [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
Assessment of resources and waste policy in England. (n.d.). Available at: https://www.theoep.org.uk/sites/default/files/investigations-files/Assessment%20of%20resources%20and%20waste%20policy%20in%20England.pdf.
The Productivity Institute. (2025). Unbound: UK Trade post-Brexit - The Productivity Institute. [online] Available at: https://www.productivity.ac.uk/research/unbound-uk-trade-post-brexit/ [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
Eia-international.org. (2025). The UK Government must end its waste colonialism by banning plastic waste exports now - EIA. [online] Available at: https://eia-international.org/blog/the-uk-government-must-end-its-waste-colonialism-by-banning-plastic-waste-exports-now/ [Accessed 14 Dec. 2025].
I've worked out who Gully is. Something about his tone rang a bell. I believe he may be Darren Crafty Wank Grimes. Something about the whiny sound of his comments on these pieces. Sounds so much like that unfortunate Mummy's basement dwelling pillock.
Keep going Bearly, you are doing a great job and, no, I will not be buying the book. Immediately after the referendum outcome, my family was on holiday in France and I cannot forget how we had to spend so much of our social mingling time apologising to our hosts for our stupidity in allowing so much false campaign information to stand. Moving back closer is the best I can expect in what remains of my lifetime.