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

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to make (1) regulatory, or (2) other, responses to findings in the Big Compost Study which concluded that 60 per cent of items sold as "home compostable" did not degrade in homes under real world conditions.

HM Government has no immediate plans to regulate in this area but welcomes the findings from UCL’s study into the home composting of plastics and will use this to inform our evidence base.

The study has shown that home composting is not a viable destination for managing plastic waste and this echoes HM Government’s existing position to prioritise the reduction, reuse and recycling of plastics before anything else.

In April 2021 we published our response to the call for evidence on the need for standards for bio-based, biodegradable and compostable plastics. The Government response acknowledges that compostable plastics must be treated in industrial composting facilities to be broken down and, when processed incorrectly, can be a source of microplastics and contaminate recycling streams. Therefore, our focus will be on reducing unnecessary consumption and working towards a circular economy, not composting of plastics.