MPs confronted with scale of plastic policy failure
Wednesday 13th July, 2022. Today in the House of Lords, Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic presented MPs and Lords with the results of The Big Plastic Count, the biggest citizen science study of plastics ever conducted with a quarter of a million participants across the UK. The event was hosted by Lord Randall, acting as spokesman for the Conservative Party, who welcomed the new research.
Deidre Brock MP, SNP spokesperson for Environment and Rural Affairs, and Alistair Carmichael MP, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs and Northern Ireland spokesperson, both responded on behalf of their parties and drew attention to the slow progress made by the UK government in contrast to Scotland’s adoption of a Deposit Return Scheme and moratorium on incinerators.
Twenty MPs and staffers were in attendance to hear that the average UK household throws away 66 pieces of plastic packaging every week, which implies that UK households as a whole will produce nearly 100 billion pieces of waste plastic a year. Of this, the UK recycles around 12%. The findings support the call made by environmental NGOs for the government to set legally binding targets to almost entirely eliminate single-use plastic, starting with a target of a 50% cut in single-use plastic by 2025. The full report of the results is available here – https://thebigplasticcount.
Pictures of the event are available here (more pictures and video will be uploaded this afternoon).
Megan Corton Scott, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said –
“The public have been diligently trying to recycle and reduce their plastic for many years, and yet these results are still a shocking exposure of the scale of plastic waste in this country. We’re doing our bit but that isn’t enough: we need the government to finally step up and show some ambition by introducing a target to stem the flow of plastic pollution. Not token gestures banning one problematic product at a time, and not more greenwash about recycling efforts that will never be adequate to address the scale of the problem. The public want action not words on plastic pollution, and they deserve a government that listens to them.”
Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic are calling on the government to set a reduction target of 50% by 2025 for all single-use plastic as part of a package of measures to address this problem [see notes].
