Time to bring back deposits on bottles

Call from campaigners fighting tide of plastic waste

BILLIONS of plastic drinks bottles are being dumped or littering our streets, parks and beaches because Britain has not hit recycling targets.

Government targets should have seen about three-quarters of plastic ‘consumer bottles’ recycled by this year.

But the actual figure, based on council rubbish and public bin collections, is less than 60 per cent.

That means an estimated 15million plastic bottles a day are dumped after being used just once.

The average household uses nearly 500 plastic bottles a year, but recycles only about half.

Millions end up as litter, blighting the country and threatening wildlife. Plastic bottles that go into normal bins are buried in landfill dumps, where they will take 450 years to degrade, or are burned.

The failure to tackle the issue has triggered calls from green campaigners for a deposit-refund scheme for plastic drinks bottles and cans.

The idea has been rejected by manufacturers, led by the British Soft Drinks Association, which denies it would reduce litter.

But Greenpeace’s Louise Edge said: ‘Drinks companies are pumping out billions of plastic bottles, many of which end up polluting our oceans. They can no longer wash their hands of the problem.

‘These companies have a responsibility to drastically reduce their plastic footprint. Deposit-refund schemes work. They’ve increased collection rates of drinks containers to over 98 per cent in some countries, so doing the same in the UK should be a no-brainer.

‘But some of these companies are trying to block them because they think it’ll hurt their profits.

‘The plastic-bag charge dramatically reduced the number of bags littering our beaches and seas. A refund scheme for plastic bottles is the obvious next step in tackling the scourge of ocean plastic pollution.’

A scheme similar to one that used to be in place for glass bottles would add between 10p and 15p to the price of a container.

This would be refunded when it was taken back to a shop or vending machine. Bottles and cans produced by Coca-Cola and Pepsi are already subject to deposit-refund schemes in Germany, much of Scandinavia and parts of the US and Canada.

The Scottish government is also considering a deposit- refund scheme. A 2014 study funded by the Government’s environment department Defra said 594,000 tons of plastic ‘consumer bottles’ were issued in 2013 – about 13billion bottles. Some 56 per cent were recycled, with 5.72billion dumped.

The research said the recycling rate would need to rise to 75 per cent by 2017 to meet Defra targets for all plastic packaging. But the most recent figures, for 2015, show a recycling rate of just 57 per cent.

On current trends, it is unlikely to reach 60 per cent this year. This figure – from Recoup, which measures council waste collection – puts the number of bottles sold a year at 13billion, with 7.5billion recycled and the rest dumped.

But Gavin Partington, of the British Soft Drinks Association, said deposit-return schemes had ‘not provided a solution’ to littering.

He said: ‘Deposit-return systems do operate effectively in some countries, but in the UK it would increase costs to consumers, businesses and councils and undermine a wellestablished kerbside recycling system which has helped raise recycling rates of plastic bottles to nearly 60 per cent. Soft drinks companies want to build on this progress by promoting recycling and supporting anti-littering initiatives.’

Defra said Britain was beating EU targets on plastic recycling and it had ‘no plans’ for a bottle deposit scheme. This week Environment Minister Therese Coffey told MPs the Government was looking at how to tackle the blight caused by plastic bottles in a new litter strategy.

One other option would be to charge manufacturers for every bottle they put on the market, then use the money to recycle them and fund litter pick-ups. Samantha Harding, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, said: ‘The [plastic] bag charge’s success has shown emphatically that people will get behind these schemes.’

‘People will get behind this’