Plastic Packaging Tax: why the price per roll of pallet wrap is the wrong number

On 1 April 2026 the Plastic Packaging Tax rises from £223.69 to £228.82 per tonne, the fourth annual uprating since the tax was introduced in April 2022. The mechanics haven't changed. It applies to plastic packaging components manufactured in or imported into the UK that contain less than 30% recycled plastic, it's paid by whoever manufactures or imports ten tonnes or more a year, and it's passed down the supply chain in the price of the product. If you buy stretch film, you're paying it whether or not it appears as a line on your invoice.

Stretch film is the most common piece of plastic packaging in almost every warehouse, and it's also the least examined. It arrives on pallets of rolls, it's bought by someone in purchasing who compares one roll price with another roll price, and as long as the pallets stay upright in the lorry nobody thinks about it again. That's the problem. The roll isn't the unit that costs you money. The pallet is.

What a roll price hides

Two rolls of film at the same price are rarely the same product. They differ in length, in gauge, in whether the film is blown or cast, and in how far it'll pre-stretch before it loses its ability to hold a load. A roll that looks 15% cheaper can easily put 30% more plastic on each pallet, because the operator or the machine needs more revolutions to reach the same containment force. It's cheaper by the roll and dearer by the pallet, and the tax is charged by the tonne.

The blown versus cast distinction matters more than most buyers realise. Cast film is clearer, quieter and cheaper to make, and it stretches easily, which is why it dominates the market. Blown film is tougher, holds better on loads with sharp corners, and tends to achieve the same containment with fewer turns. In our own audit work it's common to find a pallet being wrapped fifteen times in cast film that would hold perfectly well with eight turns of a well specified blown or high performance film. That isn't a marginal gain. It's close to half the plastic, half the weight and half the tax, with no change to the pallet, the load or the vehicle.

The only comparison that means anything is cost per pallet wrapped: the film actually consumed, priced at what you paid for it, plus the tax embedded in it, plus the operator time or machine cycle it took to apply. Once you've that number for your current film, you can compare alternatives properly. Until you've it, you're choosing between rolls on the basis of a figure that was never designed to help you.

The tax is smaller than the habit

The part that tends to surprise people is the arithmetic. At £228.82 a tonne, the tax on a pallet wrapped in 300 grams of virgin film is a little under seven pence. On 20,000 pallets a year that's around £1,400. Not nothing, but not the number that should worry you. The material itself costs several times more than the tax on it, so a business over-wrapping by 40% is losing far more to the habit than to HMRC. The tax has done a useful job of making people look at plastic. The saving, when they look, is mostly in using less of it.

Recycled content is the other half of the picture, and it's where the tax does bite. Film with 30% or more recycled plastic is outside the tax entirely, and the performance gap between recycled content film and virgin film has narrowed to the point where, for the great majority of palletised loads, there's no operational reason to specify virgin. We don't sell it. Everything we supply carries a minimum of 30% recycled content as standard, which keeps it clear of the tax threshold and removes a stream of virgin polymer from your scope 3 reporting at the same time.

What we look at on an audit

When we walk a warehouse, pallet wrap is one of the first things we stop at, because the numbers are so easy to establish and so rarely established. We unwrap a finished pallet and weigh the film. We watch the wrapping and count the turns. We check the film's gauge and recycled content against the supplier's specification rather than the label on the box. From that we can put a real cost per pallet on the current method and a real cost per pallet on the alternative, and the difference is almost always larger than the buyer expected and almost always in the film consumption rather than the tax.

If you want to do a rough version yourself before then, three numbers will get you most of the way. Weigh the film from one typical pallet. Multiply by the number of pallets you despatch in a year. Then ask your film supplier, in writing, what the recycled content is. If the answer to the third question is vague, or the weight from the first is higher than you assumed, the April rate rise is the least of what's worth fixing.