My Lords, in moving Amendment 148A, I will speak to Amendments 148B and 148C, for which the rationale is self-explanatory, and try not to get cross. In essence, the case behind the amendments is that we in the UK should be self-sufficient when it comes to waste. There was a great deal of publicity around China refusing to take our plastic rubbish but very little around the destinations the Government found to replace shipments to China: Turkey, Malaysia and Poland. There has been much talk in recent years of ours being a nation that can stand on its own feet. That being the case, there is no excuse for us to send waste for processing—certainly not to the poorest countries of the world, and not to our neighbours, partners and friends in Europe either.
3.15 pm
Concerns over plastic exports continue to grow following a recent report by Greenpeace which showed plastic waste shipped from the UK to Turkey was being illegally dumped and burned. It was intended that it should be incinerated in certified licensed plants, but this was not happening. Released in May, Trashed presented detailed findings from a Greenpeace UK investigation in March 2021. At 10 sites dotted around the outskirts of Adana in southern Turkey, investigators documented piles of plastic waste dumped illegally in fields, near rivers, on train tracks and by the roadside. In many cases, the plastic was on fire or had been burned. We would not tolerate this in our countryside. Greenpeace says that plastic from the UK was evident at all these sites. It included packaging and plastic bags from high street retailers including Tesco, Asda, the Co-op, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Lidl and Marks & Spencer, as well as Lucozade and Fanta bottles and a UK car number plate.
The UK generates more plastic waste per person than almost any other country in the world, second only to the USA, which for generations has been a throwaway nation. In 2018, the UK generated an estimated 5.2 million tonnes of plastic waste—enough to fill Wembley Stadium six times over. Having watched the football, we all know just how big Wembley Stadium is. However, inadequate infrastructure means that the UK exports the majority of its plastic waste abroad, often to countries which cannot process it. This is inexcusable.
From 2017 to 2019, two-thirds of plastic waste separated for recycling in the UK was sent abroad for processing. Those households which are diligently separating their waste into recyclable and residual have no idea that this is happening and would be appalled if they did. Some 105,000 tonnes of UK plastic were exported to Malaysia alone in 2017 and 2018. Many of the countries in the global south receiving the UK’s rubbish have high rates of plastic waste mismanagement, resulting in piles of the UK’s waste littering their roads and environment. This is often set on fire by locals and becomes an extremely toxic hazard for children playing close by. We would not allow this to happen to our own children, so why do we expect it to happen to other people’s?
Not surprisingly, countries have since begun to reject the UK’s plastic waste, with Turkey the most recent to implement a ban on plastic waste imports. Our reaction to that should not be to cast around for other countries to receive our waste but to reduce the amount of waste we produce in the first place and to work to deal with what is left right here on our own shores.
We have already discussed a number of amendments, on the first day of Committee and last Wednesday, about reducing the amount of plastic that is produced in the first place. We have heard the case for a range of measures: a target to reduce plastic packaging production; a regulatory environment that encourages compostable alternatives to conventional plastic in food contact packaging; a total ban on single-use sachets; and transparency from the supermarkets about the amount of plastic they use. If the Government believe that we as a country still need to export our plastic waste, the case for those reduction measures is even stronger.
In short, it is simply unacceptable for the UK to send its plastic waste abroad for others to deal with, and we should use the Bill to set out that principle in law. If we have more plastic waste than we can dispose of within our shores, we must produce less plastic and find an environmentally friendly way to deal with this.