Household recycling is failing to address the plastic pollution problem, according to a hard-hitting The Big Plastic Count survey.
The report claimed the UK’s recycling systems cannot cope with the amount of plastic packaging waste leaving households – estimated to be a staggering 1.85 billion pieces per week – and insists only 12% of that is likely to be recycled in the UK.
In May nearly a quarter of a million people (248,957) from 97,948 UK households took part in the survey; on average, each household threw away 66 pieces of plastic packaging in one week, amounting to an estimated 3,432 pieces a year – which amounts to an estimate of 1.85 billion pieces of plastic packaging thrown in the bin per week, equating to 96.57 billion pieces a year in the UK.
Food and drink packaging made up an overwhelming majority (83%) of the waste generated during the count.
The report said supermarket giants are responsible for a significant amount of this packaging waste.
The most commonly counted items were fruit and vegetable packaging (1.02 million pieces), closely followed by snack bags, packets and wrappers (1.01 million pieces).
With estimates suggesting only 12% of this plastic waste will be likely to be recycled at reprocessing facilities in the UK, more (17%) will be shipped overseas – with no guarantee where it ends up, and almost half (46%) of the UK’s household plastic waste is being incinerated, with the remaining 25% buried in landfill.
The majority of the plastic packaging waste thrown away by UK households is not commonly collected for recycling at the kerbside; around 62% of recorded pieces of plastic are either not collected or poorly collected by UK local authorities.
Soft plastics and plastic film are hard to recycle and accounted for the majority of pieces thrown away by participants (57%). Only 13% of local authorities collect soft plastic and this is often limited to a small number of soft plastic items, such as carrier bags, bread bags, banana bags and toilet roll wrappers.
“Too much focus is placed on recycling and making plastic recyclable, rather than reducing plastic in the first place,” read the report. “Recycling plastics is not the silver bullet that many think it is. A circular economy needs to be built around materials that can be reused and recycled many times over, which most plastic cannot.”
It added: “The only solution to plastic pollution is stopping our reliance on plastic. This means rapidly transitioning to reusable packaging which caters to everyone’s needs.”
The report also heavily criticised the repeated delays in implementing a deposit return scheme, as well as the promised new Extended Producer Responsibility requirements, and chastised the reliance on incineration and landfill sites.
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