The Big Plastic Count: 'Jaw-dropping' amount of plastic in the UK

A big survey has revealed a "jaw-dropping amount of plastic waste" is thrown out each week in the UK.

The Big Plastic Count took place over seven days in May, and involved around 100,000 households keeping a diary of every piece of plastic they threw away or recycled.

The results of the survey showed that the average person threw away 66 pieces of plastic in a week.

Using this information, the organisers of the survey - Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic - worked out that the UK on average throws out around 100 billion pieces of plastic a year.

"This is a jaw-dropping amount of plastic waste," said Greenpeace UK's plastics campaigner Chris Thorne.

"Pretending we can sort this with recycling is just industry green-wash. We're creating a hundred billion bits of waste plastic a year, and recycling is hardly making a dent." he said.

The organisers of the survey say the results show that recycling alone is not a solution for reducing how much plastic ends up as waste.

"Recycling doesn't work," said Everyday Plastic founder Daniel Webb.

"If we think things are being recycled we can carry on the way we are. We need to address things further up the chain. By reducing the amount we produce it will reduce the amount that is thrown away."

The Big Plastic Count organisers discovered that more than half of the plastics we throw out are the harder to recycle soft plastics.

The UK government shares information about the amount of plastic waste that is collected from homes in the UK, and the latest information from 2021 showed that more than 2.5 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste was created - of which only 44.2% is recycled.

Half of that recycling (55%) takes places in the UK with the rest of it shipped to other countries, like Turkey.

The Big Plastic Count report checked their findings with those of the plastic charity Recoup, and found that just 12% of our plastic waste actually ends up being recycled in the UK.

"We are going further to tackle single use plastics through our landmark Environment Act," a spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs said.