As delegates from more than 170 countries meet in Geneva to try to hammer out a global treaty on plastic pollution – a crisis most visible in our waste-strewn oceans – the UK faces its own reckoning.
Every week millions of us do our bit. We rinse yoghurt pots, flatten packaging, and sort plastic into the right bins, in the hope we’re helping the planet.
But most of that plastic isn’t recycled in the UK. It’s either shipped abroad or, more often, burned in incinerators.
In 2023 alone, more than half a million tons of plastic in the UK was incinerated, releasing carbon, wasting resources, and undermining public trust in recycling. That’s not green. That’s madness.
The real scandal? This isn’t happening because people don’t care, it’s because the system is broken. We treat recycling as a consumer issue, when it’s really an infrastructure issue. It’s about what happens after the bin is emptied. Too often, the answer is: not much.
Local councils can’t recycle flexible plastics such as films, pouches and bags. The UK lacks the capacity to process them. So they’re incinerated, buried, or exported – a tragic waste of a valuable resource.
Helping the planet: Every week millions of us do our bi by rinsing yoghurt pots, flattening packaging, and sorting plastic into the right bins
Meanwhile, the taxpayer foots the bill, and the environment pays the price.
Some argue we should stop using plastic altogether. It’s a seductive idea, but not a serious one. Plastic is essential to UK life sciences, packaging, food, construction and transport.
And we shouldn’t want to ditch it. Britain’s plastics industry is world-class: a top ten exporter, worth £10 billion in 2022, supporting 160,000 jobs in every region of the country.
What we do need to change is how we handle plastic at the end of its life.
Globally, new technologies are reshaping what’s possible. At Plastic Energy, we’ve been developing chemical recycling for more than 15 years, converting mixed, contaminated plastic from household bins into oil that can be used to make new plastic. No wishful thinking – it works, at commercial scale, today.
We chose Loughborough University as the site for our global research and development centre, and London as our headquarters. From our UK base, we’re building and operating plants in Spain, the Netherlands and France. British innovation, making a global impact.
On a mission: Ian Temperton, Chief Executive of Plastic Energy
We’re not alone. Symphony Environmental Technologies in Hertfordshire is creating smart additives to make plastics more recyclable. In Scotland, Revantas uses solvents to extract pure polymers from mixed waste.
UK firms are pioneering the next chapter in plastics – low carbon, circular, and scalable.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the policy.
It’s still too difficult to build and operate advanced recycling plants in the UK. In fact, things are going backwards – with mechanical recycling plants closing in Sunderland, Bristol and Kent.
The plastic packaging tax is a step in the right direction – rewarding manufacturers who use recycled content – but the revenue vanishes into Treasury coffers.
It should be reinvested into better sorting and reprocessing infrastructure. We also need simpler, more consistent waste collection and regulatory clarity for investors and operators.
We talk a lot about industrial policy in the UK. Well, here’s an industry we’re good at. One that’s essential to the net zero emissions goal. One with proven, investable firms. And we’ve shown we can lead.
The UK was the first country in the world to establish rules for how chemically recycled content should be counted in packaging, more than a year ahead of the European Union. Brussels has now followed our lead.
That’s the kind of confident, pragmatic leadership we need more of. Britain can lead the next generation of plastics recycling. But only if we stop burning what we could reuse and start investing in the systems that make it possible.
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