Britain’s largest survey of household plastic waste shows that “recycling isn’t working,” writes the BBC news portal.
The survey (High Number of Plastics) was conducted in one week in May, and its results showed that the average household discarded 66 pieces of plastic during this time. Based on this, the organizers – Everyday Plastic and Greenpeace – have estimated that households in the UK throw nearly one hundred billion pieces of plastic into the trash every year.
Nearly 100,000 households took part in the survey, meticulously documenting every piece of plastic thrown into the trash during the week.
According to the organizers, the results of the survey show this
Recycling alone is not the solution to reducing the amount of plastic waste.
“We generate 100 billion pieces of plastic waste every year, and recycling has little or no impact,” said Chris Thorne, plastics officer at Greenpeace UK.
Participants also recorded the type of plastic they used: based on the results, 83 percent of food and beverage packaging waste came, most often from fruit and vegetable packaging.
Based on the latest data – 2021 – from the UK government, more than 2.5 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste was created in homes, of which 44.2 per cent was recycled, half (55 per cent) occurred in the UK, and the remainder was taken abroad, The most common destination was Turkey.
Not all plastics are easy to sort and recycle. According to the charity (Recoop).
61 percent of plastic bottles are reused, 36 percent of plastic dishes, and only 8 percent of foil.
Survey results show that more than half of the discarded plastic is difficult to recycle, the so-called soft plastic. The survey organizers compared their results with data from Recoup and found that only 12 per cent of plastic waste is recycled in the UK.
