Based on the data of one hundred thousand families, the situation turned out to be bad.
Nearly 100,000 households took part in Britain’s largest survey of household plastic waste, the Big Plastic Count, which took place over the course of a week in May and meticulously documented every single piece of plastic tossed that week. According to the results, during this time, the average family threw 66 pieces of plastic. Based on this, the organizers – Everyday Plastic and Greenpeace – estimated that
Nearly a hundred billion pieces of plastic are discarded by British households every year.
According to the organizers, survey results show that recycling is not the only 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, Greenpeace UK Plastics Officer.
Most plastic comes from food and drink packaging
Survey participants also recorded the type of plastic they used: Based on the results, 83 percent of food and beverage packaging waste, mostly from fruit and vegetable packaging. Based on the latest data from the British government in 2021, more than 2.5 million tons of plastic packaging waste was generated in households, of which 44.2 per cent was recycled, 55 per cent was recycled in the UK, and the rest was transported abroad, mainly to Turkey .
Not all plastics are easy to sort and recycle. According to a charity called Recoup
61 percent of plastic bottles, 36 percent of plastic containers, and only 8 percent of foil are reused.
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 to the Recoup data and came to the conclusion
In the UK, only 12 percent of plastic waste is recycled.
(Source: MTI)
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