100 billion reasons to turn the plastic pollution tide

How many pieces of plastic do you think we British throw away each year?

The answer is a staggering and more that disturbing 100 billion!

On average each home gets rid of 66 pieces of plastic every day – with only a small fraction of these being recycled. The Big Plastic Count saw nearly 100,000 British households count every piece of disposable packaging they used over the course of a week in May.

If scaled up, it suggests Britons are chucking out 96.6 billion pieces of plastic a year, according to Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic. The most common piece of plastic thrown out was packaging from fruit and vegetables, followed by snack bags, packets and wrappers.

Around 46 per cent of plastic is incinerated, with 25 per cent being dumped in landfill.