Britain is heading for a waste meltdown with used plastic needing to be burnt or sent to landfill, warns recycling chief
Toxic waste plastic is piling up Britain's landfills as a result of a Chinese ban on imported rubbish and the UK must find solutions to the recycling problem
TOXIC waste plastic may have to be burned or buried here after China called time on importing it for recycling.
In 2016 China took in 400,000 tonnes – but from January 1 this year it has banned further imports of “foreign garbage”.
Now, with UK stockpiles building up, eco-group Greenpeace warn that incinerating plastic to recover energy from it is “the wrong answer” – while landfill is also a concern.
A spokesman said: “It’s a high-carbon, non-renewable form of generating electricity. It is also one that creates toxic chemicals and heavy metals.”
Environment Secretary Michael Gove admitted in November that he had not given China’s ban “sufficient thought”, after leaders announced it during the summer.
This month he is due to publish a 25-year plan to improve the environment, in which he will target single-use plastic and encourage retailers to reduce the number of different plastics they use, to make recycling less complicated. A spokesman at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs stressed it is already introducing a ban on plastic beads, has taken billions of plastic carrier bags out of circulation with a charge on their use and is considering a return scheme for plastic bottles.
Here, the CEO of trade body the UK Recycling Association explains what should be done about the plastic menace.
PLASTIC is already piling up in Britain following China’s import ban — and I’m afraid we haven’t got a plan B to deal with it.
After watching TV show Blue Planet II, we all know how devastating plastic pollution can be.
A baby pilot whale was seen floating dead and it likely perished because its mother’s milk had been contaminated with plastic.
Blue Planet has taken recycling right to the top of the agenda.
Environment Secretary Michael Gove said it was one of the major things that triggered his conscience to look at solutions.
And now, with China closing its doors on our rubbish, our plastic problem is coming home.
I’m afraid the Government has been caught sleeping at the wheel with this.
We wrote to Mr Gove in July, pointing out what was going to happen in China.
But the Government hasn’t reacted quickly enough.
It’s a potential crisis point. Everyone’s used to sending their recycling to China and now it’s stopped.
The ban started on January 1 but we haven’t been exporting to China for the past couple of months, because it takes six or eight weeks for material to arrive.
China has stopped taking our plastics for two reasons.
Firstly, the poor quality of the plastics they were getting from us. Secondly, they want to stimulate collection and recycling of their own waste.
The capacity for other countries importing our plastics is going to be very, very limited.
Undoubtedly, the only option for some of this material is to burn it and recover the energy from it.
And possibly in some situations where incineration is not available, it may have to go into landfill.
That’s the stark reality.
Modern incinerators are very good in terms of emissions, but with incineration you have a non-renewable material, that’s petroleum-based, which you lose for ever.
The whole idea with recycling is that you go round in a circle and keep using that resource.
Once you burn it, that petroleum product is gone.
So we urgently need the Government to step in and develop our recycling infrastructure, and we need to get away from the horrendously mixed-up material with many different polymers and different designs which we can’t recycle.
What we want Mr Gove to do, as he’s started to do, is review the whole system.
The Government has come to the table and put forward a plan to review plastics and how they are produced and recycled.
But they have been guilty of not putting together a long-term, self sufficient, joined-up, coherent recycling policy.
The China import ban has concentrated our minds on how we design and use material in the first place.
The best method is just don’t use or produce it in the first place.
An example is the shirt I got for Christmas.
I took it out of the packaging and just under the collar there was a cardboard sleeve.
I understand why that’s there, to present the shirt. But then, at the front of the shirt, I had this little plastic tab that fits under the top button.
Why? It comes down to supply-chain responsibility. Designers, manufacturers and retailers have to look at what they produce and ask: “Do we really need to produce this in the first place?”
For example, does a cucumber really need to be covered in plastic?
Consumers can be part of the solution.
Next time you go shopping, shop on the basis of recyclability.
Don’t buy a quiche or pie that has a cardboard outer package and a plastic window, only buy the one which is 100 per cent cardboard.
If you mix cardboard and plastic together you’re making it far more difficult to recycle them.
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We also want the Government to step in and start looking at financial measures to force the producers of these materials to either not produce them in the first place or, if they have to, then make them fully recyclable.
Local authorities need to take greater responsibility for telling the public what they can and can’t recycle too — instead of just chucking a recycling bin at us and telling us to use it.
Their publicity, marketing and promotions have been poor, and that hasn’t been helped by Government cutbacks.
We have relied on China far too much. Now it’s time for Britain to find solutions to our plastic recycling here.