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Plastic bottles are reviled for polluting the oceans, leaching chemicals into drinks and being a source of microplastics in the human body.
They even cause problems with recycling. When plastic bottles are mixed with cardboard in recycling bins, in the wet winter months the sodden cardboard wraps around the plastic bottles and trays, causing havoc at recycling plants.
New figures now suggest that plastic contamination in paper and card jumps by 40% between November and March and as a result the UK sends an extra 5,000 tonnes of plastic waste to landfill or incineration.
The government is expected to signal in the next few weeks whether it will continue a Conservative policy which planned to allow councils to collect “co-mingled” recycling or if it will insist that paper, plastic, glass, metal, food and garden waste should be separated at source.
The data on contamination comes from DH Smith, which recycles about a fifth of all paper and card in the UK at its Kemsley papermill in Kent. “We’ve built up a wealth of data over a few years and we can see this seasonal effect where contamination levels increase through the wetter winter months,” said Jonathan Scott, DH Smith’s technical operations director.
Recycling in England has stalled, according to official figures released in September, with the household recycling rate falling from 44.6% in 2022 to 44.1% last year.
In the three other nations of the UK, the rate increased. Overall the UK generated 191.2m tonnes of waste in 2020, the majority from construction and demolition, down from 222.2m tonnes in 2018.
In 2021, Boris Johnson’s government introduced the Environment Act as a replacement for EU regulations and started consulting on a deposit return scheme for drinks bottles, an extended producer responsibility (EPR) scheme where companies should pay for the cost of disposing of packaging they create, and minimum standards on bin collections.
Progress has been slow. EPR was delayed after lobbying by food and drink companies and fees will be levied from October 2025. The deposit return scheme for England and Northern Ireland was announced by environment minister Mary Creagh last month and excludes glass, although schemes already exist in Scotland and Wales.
Chris Mills, program lead for policy and insights at Wrap, the recycling campaigners, said there were environmental and economic benefits from separating waste, but there was a trade-off since it would be hard for people in communal buildings to have lots of separate collections.
“We think a degree of separation is definitely beneficial,” he said.
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Andy Graham, the District Councils Network environment spokesperson, said recycling rates could be raised through better education and the government needed to create a national approach rather than a “patchwork”.
“We really need a sustainable funding package for three years for us to be able to achieve any real difference,” he said. “We’ve got an increase of deliveries to homes – Amazon, for example is one of the key proponents of cardboard for home deliveries and some of that volume is unnecessary.”
Amazon has said that it has reduced the weight of its packaging by an average of 41% since 2015 and has replaced single-use plastic with paper and cardboard in Europe.