Shaming of the plastic bottle giants

MPs slam Lucozade and Ribena for their ‘absurd’ film-wrapped bottles that can’t be recycled

PLASTIC bottles of Lucozade and Ribena are impossible to recycle, MPs were told yesterday.

The soft drinks bottles are wrapped in a film that contaminate recycling, as they are made of a type of plastic which cannot be processed, a select committee heard.

Yesterday Mary Creagh, chairman of the Environmental Audit Committee, branded the use of the unrecyclable plastic ‘ an absurdity’.

She said legislation may be necessary to stop manufacturers making goods that have to be burnt, buried in landfill or shipped to China instead of being recycled.

The MP asked Barry Turner from the British Plastics Federation: ‘Why do your members produce products that cannot be recycled in British recycling facilities?’

Asked by Mr Turner for a specific example, she said: ‘You have wrappings on plastic bottles of unrecyclable polymers.

‘The Lucozade wrapping for example. Why do we need a plastic wrapping around a plastic bottle?’ Mr Turner replied: ‘We cannot dictate to a brand what they choose to use.’

Mrs Creagh responded: ‘ So you just give them anything they want. And if it’s unrecyclable, that’s fine,’ adding, ‘ So, it needs to be regulated away.

‘If you told the consumers this is unrecyclable, they wouldn’t buy it, so you keep people in the dark.’ The committee heard that of 30billion plastic bottles used by UK households each year, only 57 per cent are currently recycled, with the rest going to landfill.

As well as this, a staggering 700,000 plastic bottles a day end up as litter.

The Daily Mail is leading calls for a deposit scheme on plastic bottles to stop them polluting our land and seas.

Mr Turner said it would be possible for the UK to make all plastic bottles of 50 per cent recycled material – a requirement that has already been brought in by France.

Mrs Creagh also asked Gavin Partington, director general of the British Soft Drinks Association, why his members made plastic that could not be reused.

Mr Partington responded: ‘The bottle itself is 100 per cent recyclable. The film can be extracted and can be reprocessed.’

Mrs Creagh said: ‘But it isn’t, is it? Because your members don’t label it clearly. That’s the polymer that pollutes the rest of the plastic stream’.

She continued: ‘ My understanding is there is only one facility in the country that can recycle plastic film.

‘It is not feasible or cost-effective for 300 waste authorities to pick out every bit of cling film or plastic polymer in the middle of sorting … isn’t there an absurdity in that?’

Mr Partington said he accepted ‘that it is a problem’ his mem- bers are seeking to address now, and added: ‘We do not have adequate reprocessing and recycling facilities in the UK.’

A spokesman for Lucozade Ribena Suntory said: ‘The plastic sleeve we use is made from the same recyclable plastic as our bottles, but not all local authority recycling centres are set up to recycle this yet.

‘ We are collaborating with them to adapt our packaging; designing it for maximum recyclability within the existing UK infrastructure.’

Earlier this year, the chief executive of the Recycling Association, Simon Ellin, singled out Lucozade bottles as one of the hardest things to recycle – the hardest of all being tubes of Pringles crisps.