MPs urge deposit scheme for bottles
A UK-WIDE scheme to charge a deposit for drinks bottles which is paid back when they are returned for recycling is needed to turn the tide on plastic waste, MPs urged.
All public premises which serve food or drink including leisure and sports centres should be required to provide free drinking water on request, to cut the use of throwaway water bottles, and public water fountains should be encouraged.
And companies should be made financially responsible for the plastic packaging they produce, the Environmental Audit Committee said.
The Government should also bring in rules for 50 per cent recycled plastic content in plastic bottles to be achieved by 2023 at the latest, they urged. In a new report, the committee warned that only 7.5 billion of the 13 billion plastic bottles used in the UK each year are recycled, while the rest end up in landfill, are littered or incinerated. Burning or throwing bottles into landfill produces about 233,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, while littered plastic bottles harm the countryside and wildlife and end up in the seas where they make up a third of all plastic pollution.
With the issue of ocean plastic pollution high on the agenda in the wake of the BBC’s
nature series and campaigns by organisations from Greenpeace to Sky, potential measures to cut plastic waste are under the spotlight.
Mary Creagh, chairwoman of the Environmental Audit Committee, said: “Urgent action is needed to protect our environment from the devastating effects of marine plastic pollution which, if it continues to rise at current rates, will outweigh fish by 2050.”
A spokesman for the Environment Department (Defra) said: “We are determined to tackle plastic waste and have made progress by taking nine billion plastic bags out of circulation.”