Thousands join our Plastic Pick Up

Once, most plastic waste was impossible to recycle. But today’s technical wizardry is changing that – all the more reason to join in the Mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up!

MORE than 7,000 Daily Mail readers across the country have joined our campaign to tackle Britain’s throwaway culture over a bumper weekend next month.

We want readers and their friends and families to spare a few hours of their time to collect as much discarded plastic as they can.

In less than a week, 7,330 people have signed up to the Mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up campaign, with 315 pick-ups ready to roll out from Friday, May 11, to Sunday, May 13.

Our growing army of volunteers is raring to clean up beauty spots, beaches, streets and parks and step up our battle against the plastic plague. The campaign has been backed by Theresa May and celebrities including television wildlife experts Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham.

A fantastic prize of an all-expensespaid trip to a Sea Life Centre with Mr Packham is on offer for the top litterpicking school.

The Great Plastic Pick Up comes a decade after the Mail launched its trail-blazing campaign to end the scourge of plastic bags, which clog our oceans, litter the countryside and kill seabirds and wildlife.

FROM the soles of your shoes to the comb you use on your hair, plastic has become an unavoidable part of modern life. But now that we know the damage it can wreak on wildlife, momentum is growing in the effort to re-use and recycle more plastic — and to clear up the toxic trash littering our beaches and countryside.

On the weekend of may 11-13, thousands of people across the UK will come together to clear their community spaces of litter as part of the Great Plastic Pick Up this paper is organising in conjunction with Keep Britain Tidy.

So, what will actually happen to the plastic picked up over that weekend?

Well, once your Pick Up is over, you’ll be encouraged to register the number of bags you collected with greatplasticpickup.org — then check the website for details of how to get it to your local authority’s recycling facility.

Each local authority works with various recycling plants around the country, where your plastic will be sorted, shredded, washed and melted down into pellets. These pellets are then sold on to manufacturers to use as part of their plastic production.

Richard mcIlwain, deputy chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, explains: ‘The more we can recycle, the more cost-effective this process will become, reducing our dependency on the oil needed to produce virgin [newly made] plastic and ultimately limiting the amount of plastic washing around in our oceans.’

Recycled plastic has always been far more expensive to use than new virgin plastic. Some types are so hard to re-use they have traditionally been considered impossible to recycle.

But now, forward-thinking companies are coming up with innovative ways to put waste plastic to good use. Here, we reveal all the ways they’re creating a fresh new life for the trash you’ll find on the mail’s Great Plastic Pick Up . . .

KAYAKS MADE FROM FISHING NETS

IN JANUARY this year, the first kayak made from recycled fishing nets came off the production line.

It was created by amateur diver Rob Thompson, who was desperate to find a use for all the abandoned nets, crab pots and fisherman’s rope he came across while exploring underwater.

An estimated 600,000 tons of damaged or dumped plastic netting has built up in the oceans, where it traps and strangles sea life.

He dreamed up a plan to turn the nets into kayaks, which beachcleaning crews could then use to access remote stretches of coastline — and clear them of even more toxic plastic trash.

He tracked down a recycling plant in Denmark that would accept old nets and convert them into recycled plastic pellets.

Then, working with a kayak company called Palm Equipment, based near Bristol, he found a way to turn the pellets made from nets into a kayak by mixing the pellets with recylced marine plastic collected from beach clear-ups.

Now Rob has teamed up with Keep Britain Tidy, organising volunteer divers and beach-cleaning groups from around the UK to gather fishing nets and ship them off to Denmark in bulk, rather than seeing them dumped in landfill.

‘The first batch has produced 150kg of recycled plastic pellets, which is enough for six kayaks,’ says Rob.

The prototypes are being used by beach clean-up volunteers, but the next batch will be sold (for around £370 each) and the proceeds will help rid Britain’s waters of yet more plastic ( fathomsfree.org).

SHAMPOO BOTTLES FROM BEACH WASTE

THE sight of plastic food and drink packaging littering British beaches is a sickening reminder of the work that still needs to be done.

But volunteer beach clean-up crews — many of whom will be taking part in our Great Plastic Pick Up weekend — have the option to put plastic that has been dumped or washed up on beaches into special bins funded by Procter & Gamble.

The company will then use this ‘ ocean plastic’ — traditionally considered very difficult to recycle, as it is often degraded after spending time in the water — into new bottles of Head & Shoulders shampoo and Fairy Liquid.

There’s 25 per cent recycled beach plastic in each bottle of Head & Shoulders Beach, and 10 per cent in Fairy Liquid Ocean. The rest of the bottle is made of other recycled plastics.

The process has been made possible by recycling company TerraCycle, which provides the bins and sorts the plastic. Its spokesman Stephen Clarke says: ‘Plastic coming from the marine environment is notoriously difficult to re-use, but we have found a technically revolutionary way of integrating 25 per cent of this plastic into the product.’

DECKING FROM MILK BOTTLE TOPS

ImAGINE being able to wander into your garden to enjoy a morning coffee on your stylish decking, confident that it hasn’t started to rot over the winter, there’s no mildew to scrub off and no splinters — plus the satisfaction of knowing it’s also great for the environment.

In recent years, the single biggest use of lowgrade recycled plastic in the UK (such as bottle tops, yoghurt pots and bleach bottles) has been the manufacture of ‘plastic wood’ — plastic planks moulded to look like wood which are then used to build outdoor furniture and play equipment.

The problem is most types look much more like unsightly plastic than timber.

But a company called Composite Prime has melted down recycled plastic and mixed it with unwanted off-cuts of hardwood, ground down to a fine flour, to create durable, low-maintenance decking which looks just like the real thing.

Each plank has roughly 35 per cent plastic from discarded milk bottles and their tops.

‘We saved over 9.5million milk bottles from landfill last year,’ says Charles Taylor, a director of the company.

A KITCHEN FROM COLA BOTTLES . . .

THAT plastic bottle you toss into the recycling bin could one day return as part of your kitchen cabinet door.

Ikea’s new KUNGSBACKA range of kitchen fronts is made from recycled wood coated in a thin plastic foil made from recycled bottles, with 25 half-litre bottles used for each door.

Darryl Pirie, of Ikea kitchens, says: ‘The range turns everyday waste into beautiful furniture.’

Ikea also makes storage boxes (£3 to £12) from recycled plastic bottles, spray bottles (80p) from waste plastic collected from the store and its distribution centres, and a desk pad (£4.50) made with 50 per cent recycled plastic from Ikea packaging.

. . . AND A MATTRESS

YOU could soon be dozing off on a soft mattress made from plastic bottles collected during the Great Plastic Pick Up. Silentnight uses

150 recycled plastic bottles in each of its Eco Comfort Pocket mattresses (£489 for a double, silentnight.co.uk).

The mattress, launched last year, is made from plastic bottles that are crushed and spun into a fine, soft fibre. This is then used to form a special breathable layer that makes sleeping on it a cooler, more comfortable experience.

In one year alone, Silentnight claims to have prevented 105 million plastic bottles from entering landfill or the sea.

ROADS MADE OF PLASTIC PELLETS

You could be driving to work over a recycled plastic road.

Toby McCartney, founder of road surfacing company MacRebur, came up with the idea after a trip to India. He saw locals collect waste plastic from rubbish dumps, pile it up over potholes in the road, pour petrol over it and set it alight. ‘I watched with fascination as the melted plastic moulded to fit the shape of the hole, effectively filling it for free,’ he says.

Now Toby takes plastic waste from local authority recycling plants across the country — ‘It’s the waste plastic no one really wants and which would normally be incinerated or go to landfill,’ he says — then melts it into pellets, which are added to an ordinary road surface mix to supplement the bitumen.

‘our roads are up to 60 per cent stronger and ten times longer lasting — and they don’t pothole,’ he says proudly.

COFFEE CUPS FROM . . . COFFEE CUPS!

THEY might look like they’re made from paper, but most takeaway coffee cups are lined with a thin layer of plastic. It stops your coffee from leaking out, but also makes them notoriously difficult to recycle.

Now a uK company called Sea change: Team GB’s Emily Evans in a kayak made of recycled plastic. Inset: Other new products made of plastic waste ashortwalk, based in Cornwall, has designed the rCup, made from discarded coffee cups.

Managing director Dan Dicker explains that the company gathers takeaway cups from outlets such as McDonald’s and Costa. They are then washed, shredded, and mixed 50/50 with recycled plastic from coffee cup lids and straws.

The rCup is leakproof, insulated, lasts ten years and is fully recyclable (£12 from www.

rcup. co. uk, Waitrose and John Lewis).

TRAINERS FROM OCEAN PLASTIC

YouR new trainers could once have been a discarded fishing net floating in the Maldives. Adidas has teamed up with a company called Parley for the oceans, which organises coastal clean-ups in the remote island chain. The fishing nets and plastic they gather are turned into sports shoes. The upper is 95 per cent recycled ocean plastic that is melted down and spun into a technical yarn fibre called Econyl that behaves exactly like nylon. The rest of the shoe is made from recycled polyester. Marine waste is also used in the laces, heel webbing, heel lining and sock liner covers, adding up to the equivalent of 11 plastic bottles per pair. The Adidas x Parley sports shoes range starts at £69.95.

NEW JUMPERS FROM RAGS

ouTDooR clothing brand Patagonia was creating fleeces from plastic bottles as far back as 1993.

Today it turns plastic bottles, difficult-to-recycle manufacturing waste and worn- out garments into thin polyester fibers, which are then used to produce clothing such as the Snap-T fleece pullover (from £80, eu.patagonia.com) which is made from 85 per cent recycled polyester.

‘By recycling old products, we can keep many of the same materials in circulation for years instead of creating new plastic,’ says a spokesperson.

SHADES FROM TRAWLER WASTE

IN 2013, a group of u.S. surfers and environmentalists formed a firm called Bureo to help fishermen in Chile discard their old fishing nets responsibly rather than dumping them at sea.

The nets are recycled to create decks for skateboards ( around £ 200, carverskateboards. and the frames for high-fashion sunglasses.