5 surprising things we learned from the biggest ever household plastic count - a report from https://www.greenpeace.org.uk

Greenpeace UK

5 surprising things we learned from the biggest ever household plastic count

(dated :13th July 2022)

After weeks of number crunching, The Big Plastic Count results are finally here!

Nearly a quarter of a million people counted their household plastic packaging waste for one week, and the results are fascinating. Here are the most surprising things we’ve learnt…

1. UK households throw away approximately 96 billion pieces of plastic packaging a year

That’s a mindblowing, absurd number. It’s so difficult to imagine just how big 96 billion is, but it works out around 11 million piece of plastic per hour, or 3,000 every second. It’s staggering.

Participants in The Big Plastic Count threw away 6,437,813 pieces of plastic packaging in just one week, which means on average each household threw away 66 pieces. This amounts to 3,432 pieces a year, and we arrive at 96 billion pieces a year for the whole country by applying this average to all UK households.

The message couldn’t be clearer: too much plastic waste is leaving our homes.

2. The vast majority of it is food and drink packaging

83% of the plastic packaging waste we throw away comes from food and drink packaging.

If you’re a supermarket shopper, maybe this doesn’t come as a surprise, as the shelves are so overflowing with single-use plastic packaging that it’s very difficult to avoid it. This is especially the case for anyone with a disability or restricted mobility who may rely on pre-prepared food for their independence and quality of life.

Supermarket giants sell most of our groceries, so it’s safe to say that they are responsible for an awful lot of our plastic packaging waste. We’ve had many promises from supermarkets to reduce their plastic footprint, but this actually increased across the top ten supermarkets between 2017 and 2019.

Voluntary commitments are not working.

3. Just 12% of our household plastic packaging waste is recycled

Millions of us do our bit by recycling – it’s part of everyday life in the UK. But we estimate that only 12% of our household plastic packaging waste is actually recycled in the UK. A minority.

This number might be disheartening, but it’s still important to recycle and we should all continue to do so. But we can’t avoid the fact that recycling alone won’t solve the plastic crisis – we are throwing away so much, we’ll never be able to recycle it all, and much of it is never recyclable in the first place.

It’s vital that we reduce the amount of plastic produced at source by turning off the plastic tap, and rapidly transitioning to reusable packaging which caters to everyone’s needs, including those with disabilities.

4. The rest is burned, landfilled or exported

The vast majority of the UK’s household plastic packaging waste is either shipped overseas, or landfilled or incinerated in the UK.

How can the UK claim to be a world leader in managing our waste while this is happening?

We’re producing so much plastic packaging waste that we can’t cope with it ourselves, so 17% of it is exported to other countries to deal with. Greenpeace investigators have previously revealed how this waste may be dumped and burned illegally, creating environmental and human health crises in countries around the world. It’s waste colonialism.

A quarter of our waste ends up in landfill, where it slowly degrades and releases toxins and microplastics, which can pollute the air and waterways – with grave consequences for neighboring communities and natural environments.

And almost half (46%) is burnt in incinerators, which also place local people at risk from the toxic gasses released. And we can’t forget that plastic is made from fossil fuels, so burning it releases greenhouse gasses that are fueling the climate crisis.

We wouldn’t need to rely upon these dirty, polluting methods of disposing of plastic packaging waste if we didn’t produce so much of it in the first place.

5. The majority of plastic we throw away is soft plastic

Just over half of the pieces of plastic thrown away during The Big Plastic Count were soft plastics and plastic film – used in everyday items like crisp packets, bread bags and toilet roll wrap. Soft plastic is notoriously difficult to recycle – meaning just 13% of local authorities collect it.

Supermarkets have tried to fill this gap, through the recent nationwide roll-out of soft plastic take-back schemes. These allow shoppers to drop off plastic waste in-store for recycling, and have proved popular (but are not always accessible for people with disabilities or mobility issues who are unable to visit a store in person). However, an investigation into Tesco’s take-back scheme revealed that some plastic was being exported for incineration or landfill, rather than being recycled. Our recycling systems cannot effectively deal with soft plastics.

What next?

These results paint a dire picture of the UK’s plastic use and waste management systems.

The UK’s plastic crisis is even worse than anyone imagined – we cannot cope with the amount of plastic waste generated – and too much focus has been placed on recycling to solve it. We’re never going to be able to recycle our way out of this mess, and pretending that recycling is a silver bullet is simply industry greenwash.

The government must step in with tough measures to drive a reduction in plastic production and a transition to a circular economy built around materials that can be reused and recycled many times over. This means they need to:

• Set an ambitious, legally binding single-use plastic reduction target under the environment act, to cut single-use plastic by 50% by 2025. All reusable alternatives to single-use plastic must be universally designed to work for everyone’s needs, and decisions must be informed by the disabled community
• Immediately implement an all-in Deposit Return Scheme for plastic bottles, to encourage reuse, and set new Extended Producer Responsibility Requirements to incentivise a transition to reusable packaging

At the same time, the government must tackle the catastrophic social and environmental consequences of waste exports and incineration, by:

• Banning all plastic waste exports by 2025.
• Setting an immediate moratorium on building new incinerators or upgrades of old ones.

The Big Plastic Count has provided overwhelming evidence of the UK’s plastic crisis. Neither this evidence, nor the 248,957 people who gathered it can be ignored. It is time for the government to act.

So there it is in black and white,what a lot of us have been screaming about for it seems like forever! It is the work of everyone, not just people at the bottom end of the chain,trying to do the right thing and not getting as far as would be liked.

This plastic count was done in the UK, but there is no doubt in my mind the same applies here in Menorca, all of Spain, Europe and the rest of the world.  What is it going to take to get things changed?

We are all to blame, but the onus must be placed on the producers of the items to use suitable packaging, yes we can change to glass but as you may have seen in one or two of my blogs there are not many alternatives, at the moment. We, as consumers can also stop buying so much of these items, I am sure 2 litres of a fizzy drink is not absolutely essential to live (for example).

The blog song for today is: " Can't get it out of my head" by ELO

TTFN

 

Recycling isn’t the ‘panacea’ that saves oceans from plastic - a report from https://www.nationalobserver.com

 

Recycling isn’t the ‘panacea’ that saves oceans from plastic

By Rochelle Baker | News, Island Insider | June 30th 2022

Greenpeace volunteers do a plastics audit at a 2018 beach cleanup in Vancouver. Photo by Amy Scaife / Greenpeace

Canada has the opportunity to position itself as a leader in tackling the world’s marine plastics problem at this week’s UN Ocean Conference, experts say.

However, to effect real change, Canada and its international partners will have to aggressively wean themselves off unnecessary plastics and accelerate the development of a global circular economy to make sure plastic pollution doesn't end up in oceans.

“There’s no question the world faces a bit of an existential crisis over how best to proceed on the plastic economy front,” said Peter Ross, senior scientist and director of water pollution at Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

Big or small, plastics are ingested by virtually every creature in the marine food chain, causing harm to animals from zooplankton to whales, Ross said.

Marine plastic pollution exacerbates the decline of marine biodiversity, a crisis already made worse by global warming, with more than 800 marine and coastal species suffering impacts from the ingestion, entanglement and absorption of the petroleum product.

A baby turtle grapples with plastic on a Sumatra beach. Photo by Paul Hilton / Greenpeace

Plastic has no half-life

There’s no getting rid of it, said Ross, a former researcher with Fisheries and Oceans Canada — plastic only breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces.

“The reality is recycling is not going to be the panacea that saves the world's ocean,” said @Raincoast scientist Peter Ross about dealing with marine plastic pollution as Canada participates in the #UNOceanConference.

“It breaks down physically but not chemically. It has basically no half-life,” Ross said.

Beyond being permanent pollutants, virtually all plastics are made from fossil fuels and contribute significantly to the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. In a business-as-usual scenario, emissions from plastic production, use and disposal in 2040 would eat up 19 per cent of the world’s carbon budget under the UN Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 C.

The vast majority of plastic pollution in oceans comes from sources on land that then finds a way into water systems, Ross explained.

“We are creating a geological layer for future archeologists and anthropologists to sift through the rubble and find this layer of plastic around planet Earth.”

Forums on marine plastics pollution at the conference emphasized the global scale of the problem. Some 11 million tonnes of plastic waste flow annually into oceans — a volume that may triple by 2040 if the status quo continues.

A week before the UN gathering, Canada put into action a phased ban on six single-use plastics, including checkout bags, non-recyclable takeout containers, straws, stir sticks, cutlery, and the yokes or plastic rings on six-packs of beverage cans. The new rules come with timelines to restrict the import, production, sale and export of these items.

Canada also helped secure an international agreement by 175 countries to develop a groundbreaking, legally binding international plastics treaty by 2024 that aims to address the full life cycle of the product and create a circular plastics economy.

But whether the plastics treaty is truly a watershed moment will depend on political will, said Ross.

“I think it's good that Canada is positioning itself for kind of a leadership role on the file,” he said.

“But with all the grand aspirations of the UN Ocean Conference … as we look ahead, the question is how do we have a blue economy?”

To halt the “moving train” of vested corporate interest in plastics production, the treaty needs to include significant improvements on the recyclability of plastics and a carrot-and-stick approach to push companies to redesign products and find innovations and alternatives in the private sector, he said.

More research on the effective monitoring of waterways, oceans and wastewater discharges is also needed to identify and tackle the most significant problems, Ross said.

Raincoast Conservation Foundation senior scientist Peter Ross says recycling does not abate marine plastics pollution. Photo by Alex Harris / Raincoast Conservation Foundation

It's a myth that recycling plastics will stem ocean pollution

The idea that plastic recycling will curtail the waste stream into oceans is “fiction,” he said.

Plastic products are full of dyes and a variety of chemicals that make them virtually impossible to recycle.

“The reality is recycling is not going to be the panacea that saves the world's ocean,” he said.

Sarah King, Greenpeace Canada's oceans and plastics campaigner, agreed.

The vast majority of plastics in Canada — 87 per cent — end up in landfills or the environment, with the packaging sector alone the source of nearly half of that garbage.

At best, Canada only has the capacity to recycle 17 per cent of its plastic waste, and the federal phaseout of single-use plastics involves a mere three per cent of the plastic headed into landfills, she said.

“We really need to look at the source of the problem, which is we’re producing too much of it,” King said.

There needs to be concrete reduction in plastic production in Canada and across the globe, she said, or plastic pollution will continue to sabotage federal and international commitments to create low-carbon economies.

A Canada's National Observer investigation into the country's top carbon emitters found three plastics and petrochemical factories — two in Alberta and one in Ontario — collectively produced about 5.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

The fossil fuel industry is banking on plastics and expanding production to ensure its future, Greenpeace asserts. And without radical change, plastics use will nearly double in Canada and triple globally by 2060, a new Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study shows.

Greenpeace Canada's oceans and plastics campaigner Sarah King (pictured in the Philippines) says the international community must set plastic waste reduction targets. Photo by Daniel Müller / Greenpeace

No country, including Canada, has concrete waste-reduction targets, King said.

To meet its net-zero plastics pledge by 2030, the federal government needs to phase out all non-essential plastics in short order, stop the production of single-use plastics and set timelines for reducing plastic production across various sectors, she said.

Canada needs to rapidly accelerate the transition to a reuse-and-refill economy, shifting to systems that don’t rely on single-use plastics to provide everyday goods and services, she said.

“We need truly zero-waste and circular systems,” she said, adding government investment will be necessary to help scale up innovation and infrastructure for the transition.

The federal government has shown leadership in calling for the plastics treaty to be ambitious and legally binding, King said.

But the concern is Canada isn’t going into international discussions, such as those underway at the ocean conference in Portugal, prioritizing a wind-down of the industry, she said.

The world is working to phase out oil and gas to combat climate change and must do the same for plastics, which is the flip side of the same coin, she said.

“They go hand in hand,” King said.

“This is definitely where governments need to come together and agree to a cap and phasedown of plastic production globally.”

We are all in a position to demand the reduction in plastic production. If we can switch to alternative packaging in even a small way it will have a significant change.  The main responsibility is on the large companies to use different packaging. Everyone needs to get on board. I saw an advertisement the other day on Sky tv (which has a part of sky news dedicated to the climate) advertising coca cola in a plastic bottle.  This has to change.

The blog song for today is:" Elected" by Alice Cooper

TTFN