Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent estimate he has made of the amount of plastic waste being sent to landfill.

Permitted sites are required to submit their waste data to the Environment Agency (EA) and this represents the main data available on waste that goes to landfill. This data categorises waste according to the European Waste Catalogue (EWC).

Under EWC, only a limited number of categories are clearly identifiable as plastic waste. The EA was notified that 82,358 tonnes of waste identifiable as plastic was sent to landfill facilities in 2018.

However, the vast majority of waste received at landfill sites is reported as mixed waste, for example municipal waste. It will contain a proportion of plastic waste. The EA is not able to estimate plastic content of mixed waste and other EWC categories and cannot reliably provide the total plastic waste disposed to landfill.

In our Resources and Waste Strategy, we committed to landfilling 10% or less of the municipal waste generated by 2035 and to implementing measures that will improve the quality and quantity of plastic waste collected for recycling, and ultimately lead to less plastic waste sent to landfill. The Environment Bill sets out provisions to improve the separate collection of recyclable waste (including plastic packaging waste); for example, from 2023 all collectors of waste will be required to collect a core set of materials, including plastics, for recycling from households, non-domestic, and commercial and industrial premises.