Britain missing out on potential £2bn recycling industry by exporting plastic waste | Recycling

A plastics recycling industry potentially worth £2bn and providing 5,000 jobs is dying in the UK due to failure to plug a loophole. 600 thousand tons of plastic waste will be exported every year.

The Guardian can reveal that 21 plastic recycling and processing factories across the UK have closed in the last two years due to the sheer size of exports, the cheap price of virgin plastic and the influx of cheap plastic from Asia, according to data collected by industry insiders.

Britain’s plastic waste exports to developing countries increased by 84 percent in the first half of this year; critics say this is unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism.

In particular, UK exports to Indonesia increased. A country struggling with the environmental crisis from plastic pollution – more than 24,000 tonnes. Total plastic waste exports in the first half of the year was 317,747 tons.

Exporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste to countries where it cannot be processed properly increases the likelihood of serious environmental pollution, as well as putting the lives of waste workers at risk.

Biffa polymers managing director James Mcleary said the industry was facing challenges and units were closing across the country.

Plastic recycling facilities that have closed in the last two years include Biffa’s Sunderland plant and three Viridor sites, which have the capacity to process 39,000 tonnes of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) plastics used in packaging each year. Vanden Recycling It also closes its plastic processing plant Whittlesey is in Peterborough.

Cleaning, sorting, processing and converting waste materials collected from UK homes into recycled products is better for the environment, captures the carbon in plastic and creates jobs and growth, experts say.

But policymakers have not made the fundamental changes needed to stop encouraging plastic waste exports.

Mcleary said the continued export of waste plastic should be an insult to our civilized society. He touched upon the deaths of 200 young people revealed in Türkiye at the beginning of this year by the ISIG Assembly, which conducted the first analysis of workplace deaths in the country’s recycling sector. England became the largest exporter of plastic waste to Türkiye in 2023.

The investigation, called Boy Wasted, revealed that 2 people are crushed, dismembered or burned to death in the sector every month, and that this situation has continued uninterruptedly for the last 10 years.

Mcleary said there was a need for a level playing field for the UK plastics recycling industry. “I don’t like closing facilities, it’s a business and people’s lives.” he said. “Fundamentally, I believe that we should take responsibility for our waste ourselves. This is common sense as a human being. I don’t want my garbage to go to Malaysia. I don’t want to wonder if there is a child somewhere whose life was wasted because I threw something in the bin outside my house.”

“As a civilized society, there are lines we should not cross; this is unacceptable.”

Mcleary said the loophole that made it cheaper for companies to export plastic rather than keep it in the UK needed to be closed. “We want a level playing field. We don’t want the market to go against us. This has been expressed by us and others for several years. But today we are in a perfect storm and factories are closing.”

He welcomed UK’s plastic packaging taxThis is a sanction imposed on manufacturers who do not include at least 30% recycled plastic in their products, as a way of increasing demand in the UK to use our own stock of plastic waste. But it wants this to be more ambitious by increasing the requirement that products have a minimum recycled content to 50% by 2030 to encourage manufacturers to include more of it in their products and reduce the use of virgin plastic.

Mcleary said establishing a plastic recycling industry in the UK to capture plastic waste thrown away domestically by householders had the potential to become a £2bn industry, employing 2,000 people directly and 3,000 indirectly, while also restoring public confidence in recycling.

“People in the UK should care about where their plastic goes,” he added. “If they think they’re recycling, they should know that it’s being recycled, and they should know that it’s being recycled responsibly.”

Viridor has closed three plastic recycling plants in the last three years; at Avonmouth, Skelmersdale and this year at the Rochester sorting facility.

An industry source said it was important for policymakers to start viewing waste as critical infrastructure. “If we stopped exporting plastic waste and met our target of an increased recycling rate of 65% for council waste by 2035, we would need to build 400 new factories across the UK, 20 of which would be sorting plants and 20 of which would be processing plants that turn material back into products,” the source said.

“This is an important growth area and has a carbon benefit because it prevents plastic from being burned and used as waste for energy. But there is a risk that we are now exporting material, investment and jobs to other countries.”

The government said it was committed to cleaning up the country and tackling plastic waste. “For too long plastic waste has been littering our streets, polluting Britain’s waterways and threatening wildlife,” a spokesman said. “Collectively, our packaging reforms will underpin a £10bn investment in new sorting and processing facilities, and implementing the deposit return scheme will ensure more plastic is recycled and not thrown away as rubbish or left to rot in landfill.”