The "Plastic Age": Plastic Pollution in the UK
"Plastic man got no brain" — From the 1969 song Plastic Man by the English rock band The Kinks.
Across the world, from the highest peaks to the deepest oceans, plastic litter is ubiquitous in our natural environment (Rhodes, 2019; Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022; Stoett et al., 2024). A failure to pass a Global Plastics Treaty in late 2024, a legally binding agreement that would end plastic pollution, jeopardises collective agreements to curb plastic production, projected to be more than 902 million tonnes by 2050 (Geyer et al., 2017, quoted in Dokl et al., 2024). Current volumes of plastic waste are overwhelming end-of-life management systems and increasing the toxic pollution of the land, sea, and air. From this contamination, microplastic —tiny particles of plastic less than 5 mm long— have been found throughout the human body, including in breast milk, the brain, and the lungs, potentially leading to severe damage to health and organs. Plastic, however, continues to be considered a cost-effective solution in mass production.
Plastic pollution has become ubiquitous in human environments and fragile ecosystems. It has reached a worrying level in the United Kingdom (UK). As a result of the 2 million pieces of litter dropped in the UK daily, the nation is wrapped in discarded plastic along its transportation systems, in its fields, rivers, and streets. It is a scourge exacerbated by a decade of significant financial cuts to road maintenance and local government cleaning and waste management. As the quality and state of the UK’s public services rapidly diminish due to austerity measures since 2010, the plastic litter volume continues to grow; as of April 2024, UK households throw away 1.7 billion pieces of plastic weekly.
This article will discuss the plastic pollution levels in the UK and its implications for the population’s health and environment.
Plastic in the UK
The UK produces more plastic waste per person than almost any other country (Vlasopoulos et al., 2023). Since the expansion of plastic manufacturing in the 1950s as a cheaper and more versatile alternative to degradable natural resources to make glass and paper, by 2018 the amount produced globally had proliferated in 70 years from 1.5 million metric tonnes to 359 million metric tonnes (Filho et al., 2021). Global plastic pollution —half of which has been attributed to the packaging of just 56 powerful food, drink, and tobacco multinationals (Cowger et al., 2024)— has reached crisis levels, with the UK a leading contributor. As of February 2024, 5.700 companies in the UK produce roughly 3.8 million tonnes of plastic annually (Polymer Compounders Ltd, 2024), but the material’s longevity as toys, cutlery and utensils, packaging for food and products, and a plethora of everyday items saw 5.2 million tonnes discarded in 2018 alone (Elliott & Elliott, 2018), leading Greenpeace to conclude that the UK is responsible for "more plastic waste per person than almost any other country in the world" (Greenpeace UK, 2021, p. 5).
Although single-use plastic fast food and takeaway items have been banned across the UK since October 2023, as a means of reducing some of the most common littered items (DEFRA, 2023), landfills continue to receive 25% of the total plastic waste, which can take up to 1,000 years to decompose (Pilapitiya & Ratnayake, 2024; Kumari et al., 2025). Consequently, the first plastics disposed of will continue to harm the environment for centuries. A noticeable restriction on single-use plastic has been the introduction, in October 2015, of a charge for shop carrier bags, which resulted in a substantial 98% drop in used or discarded bags by 2024 (Sutherland, 2024). While this has been a marked success story in changing public attitude toward plastic pollution (Oluwadipe et al., 2022, p. 912), the damage to the UK’s land and marine ecosystems from equally harmful single-use plastic products (recently banned wet wipes, for example, which release microplastics and chemicals when they decompose (Allison et al., 2025)), highlights the material’s pervading existence in our throwaway culture (Horton, 2022).
As single-use plastic degrades, it forms microplastics —fragments up to 5 mm long— which contaminate the UK’s rivers, lakes, coastlines, soil, and tap water (Meng et al., 2020; Lofty et al., 2022; Al-Mansoori et al., 2025). Their widespread and destructive presence in the environment —from maritime detritus, car tyres, and microfibres from clothing— seriously harms humans’ and animals’ physical and mental health when ingested through food and water. Plastic output levels have accelerated since 2004 (Rhodes, 2018, p. 207), causing the rise in microplastics in the world’s oceans in the last 20 years to be "unprecedented" (Eriksen et al., 2023) and on course to double by 2040 if coordinated action is not taken (Thompson et al., 2024). In the UK, field research conducted in 2021 found mismanagement of untreated wastewater by private water companies was "the dominant supplier of microplastics to rivers" (Woodward et al., 2021, p.799). The consequences are far-reaching; as rivers and streams become polluted, so do the wildlife-rich seas they feed (Derraik, 2002, quoted in Devereux et al., 2023). In the sea around the UK, 9.5 of the 12 million tonnes of microplastic that enter the water each year are transported by the polluted rivers (Smith et al., 2018, p.42). Microplastics also enter the sea from the decomposing plastic litter dropped along the UK coastline (Chen, 2021), with drink bottles, bottle tops, and crisp packets the most commonly discarded everyday items (Nelms et al., 2017).
Only 9% of the world’s plastic waste is recycled (Geyer et al., 2017, quoted in Unfried & Wang, 2024). The situation is alarming, and the "unprecedented and continuous accumulation of growing plastic contaminants" (Thushari & Senevirthna, 2020) —which destroys natural habitats, accelerates biodiversity loss and degrades sites of natural beauty— poses multiple challenges for marine environmental management along the UK’s extensive 12,500 km coastline. On land, recycling wastewater to make agricultural sewage sludge has seen the UK receive the highest microplastic contamination in its soils. In research conducted by Lofty et al. (2022), UK farmland was found to have one of the highest concentrations of microplastics in Europe, polluted each year with between 500 and 1.000 microplastic particles. Microplastics contain harmful, man-made synthetic polymers (Laskar & Kumar, 2019; Mamun et al., 2023), posing serious, long-term public health concerns of their contamination of the food chain (Cverenkárová et al., 2021; Fian et al., 2024) and therefore to the UK’s mainland primary ecosystems.
Removal and Recycling
By 2017, roughly 9 billion tonnes of plastic had been discarded by humans since its development in the 1950s (Geyer et al., 2017). Today, that amount still exists in some form, polluting the air, soil, water, and now historical and natural landmarks. Consequently, its ubiquitous presence and use have ushered in a new human period: the "Plastic Age" (Thompson et al., 2009, quoted in Dokl et al., 2024, p. 498). From this, though, the global political and social awareness and negative attitude to plastic pollution and recycling have increased (Dutta & Choudhury, 2018; Stoett et al., 2024), especially when the packaging industry in the world economy (in the EU alone, it is the largest consumer of plastic, accounting for roughly 40% of demand (Plastics Europe, 2022)) has the influence and potential to implement quick and significant changes by its extensive supply, information, logistics, organisation, and manufacturing chains (Silva & Pålsson, 2022). In the UK, half of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced yearly is used for packing (DEFRA, 2018, p. 22, quoted in Vlasopoulos, 2023). Its scale of employment involves raw material producers, packaging designers, and manufacturers (European Committee for Standardization, 2020, quoted in Zhu et al., 2022, p. 818), adding to its scope and influence. Plastic is exclusively produced from fossil fuels, accounting for 10% of oil production (Jefferson, 2019), and by 2050, it is projected to be the largest driver of oil demand. Yet, despite the research and evidence of its harmful effects on human health and the environment, the failure to pass a binding Global Plastics Treaty in 2024 highlights the power and influence of an industry with a global market valued at 600 billion USD (as of 2023).
Post-Brexit, recycling levels in the UK continue to decline (Oluwadipe et al., 2022), with just 44% of household waste recycled in 2022 (Novakovic et al., 2023). However, before the official completion of Brexit in January 2020, the UK was the 11th highest recycler in the EU in 2018, although still below the EU average. In 2021, the country’s post-Brexit plastic packaging recycling was one of the highest in the EU27 (Smith, 2024, p. 16), yet as of July 2024, a mere 17% of total plastic waste was able to be reprocessed (Panagiotidis & Wentworth, 2024, p. 3) because of an inadequate and underfunded internal infrastructure (Burgess et al., 2021). Controversially, this mismanagement, fuelled by more than a decade of cuts to local government recycling and cleaning budgets and schedules (Widdowson et al., 2015; Ogden & Philips, 2024, p. 12), has forced the UK to adopt the cheaper option of export, making the country one of the biggest exporters of plastic waste; in 2022, a House of Commons Committee reported that 60% of the UK’s packaging waste was exported (Parliament. House of Commons. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 2022, p. 40). The futility has contributed to the global plastic crisis and the growing concern about air pollution from shipping emissions.
Turkey is buried by the UK’s exported plastic waste (Gündoğdu & Walker, 2021; Karasik, 2022). In 2023, the UK sent almost 141.000 tonnes of its waste there, a staggering increase in just seven years when 12.000 tonnes were sent to a net importer with a dismal reputation for waste mismanagement (Greenpeace, 2021; Stoett et al., 2024). Other countries with equally "very low recycling rates" (Vlasopoulos et al., 2023) that receive the majority of the UK’s rubbish include Malaysia and Poland (Parliament. House of Commons. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, 2022, p. 40). Until a permanent ban in 2018, under Operation National Sword to regulate foreign deliveries of waste and recycling, China was the world’s largest plastic waste recipient, importing "a cumulative 45% of plastic waste since 1992" (Brooks et al., 2018). The repercussions of China’s policy —a 99% reduction in imports— have been disastrous for Turkey, with the country’s waste systems overwhelmed by growing imports (only 1% of domestic plastic waste is recycled (Karasik, 2022, p.3)) and diverse marine life in the Mediterranean and Black Sea choked by a yearly amount of 52.500 tons of discarded plastic (quoted in Melikoglu & Asci, 2022). A decrease in 2022 to 87.000 tonnes imported from the UK proved temporary, with Greenpeace Türkiye reporting a 60% increase in waste shipments by September 2024 (112.872 tonnes) (Greenpeace UK, 2024).
Most plastics can be recycled in the UK, yet local authorities incinerate 58% of the plastic collected from households. The rest is sent to the country’s landfill sites or recycled. Incineration of plastic creates the most emissions (Eriksson & Finnveden, 2009, quoted in Ford et al., 2022) and has adverse health impacts, contributing to cancers, respiratory problems, and birth defects. Increasing recycling rates is hindered by varying local government collecting systems (Burgess et al., 2021) and rules relating to so-called contaminated waste, i.e. non-recyclable or dirty/unwashed items, in a recycling collection, have been attributed to the low uptake of households (Oluwadipe et al., 2022). Across the country, a significant amount of plastic in recycling bins, namely plastic film wrap and bulky pots, goes uncollected (Smith, 2024). These economic, logistic, and technical factors were highlighted by the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents local authorities in England and Wales, who found, in just one year, 520.000 tonnes of household "recycling" in the UK was non-recyclable (LGA, 2021). As plastic consumption grows, particularly single-use packaging, waste management solutions can be financially and environmentally challenging for local authorities to minimalise their impact on humans, wildlife, and society.
As an island nation, the impact of climate change on the UK’s sea levels and the vulnerable coastline is already emptying the content of coastal landfills, of which there are roughly 1700 in England and Wales (Beaven et al., 2020), into the environment. The lack of oversight and maintenance, especially as most of England’s landfills "pre-date modern environmental regulations" (Brand & Spencer, 2019), will continue to release an unknown volume of pollutants into the marine and terrestrial ecosystems for decades.
From food packaging to electronics, plastic has revolutionised our everyday lives, but its benefits as "safe materials" (Villarrubia-Gomez et al., 2024), have been dwarfed by the scale of the global waste crisis. Single-use items, in particular, have had a significant impact on humans and ecosystems, with devastating consequences for future generations. Addressing this crisis requires significant amounts of targeted investment to tackle the way the millions of tonnes used annually are safely produced, discarded, and recycled. However, the UK government's austerity measures since 2010 —affecting local cleaning and hygiene management— have exacerbated the growing threat to domestic and foreign and life.
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