Plastics: Waste

(asked on 12th July 2021) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what estimate he has made of the volume of plastic waste produced in (a) England and (b) the UK in each of the last five years.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 20th July 2021

The Government's 25 Year Environment Plan sets out our ambition to eliminate all avoidable plastic waste and we are making great strides to tackle plastic pollution across the country. In December 2018 we published the Resources and Waste Strategy, which sets out how we want to achieve this, move towards a circular economy and keep resources in the system for as long as possible.

Our Environment Bill will enable us to significantly change the way that we manage our waste and take forward a number of the proposals from the Resources and Waste Strategy. The Bill will include powers to create Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes; introduce Deposit Return Schemes (DRS); establish greater consistency in the recycling system; better control the export of plastic waste; and give us the power to set new charges for other single-use plastic items. These measures will help us reduce the amount of plastic waste generated and keep resources in the system for as long as possible to extract maximum value from them.

In their plastic market situation report the Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP) estimate that 2.36Mt of plastic packaging and 2.5Mt of non-packaging plastic waste was generated in the UK in 2017. A recent plastic flow report by Valpakā€™s suggested that the amount of plastic packaging generated in the UK fell to 2.29Mt in 2019.

We do publish figures on the amount of plastic packaging generated and recycled and these can be found in our published dataset here: ENV23 - UK statistics on waste - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). The latest figures cover 2017 and we are due to publish figures for 2018, 2019 and 2020 on the 15 July.

Regarding the total volume of plastic waste generated, figures for some separately identifiable plastics are available, however there are significant tonnages of mixed waste categories, which will contain plastic, for which we do not have robust composition estimates. Therefore, we cannot provide a figure on the total volume of plastic waste generated/ produced for England or the UK.

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