Which European country collects most PET plastic bottles?

Here at UK Vending we take our recycling and environmental commitments extremely seriously. The world is fighting a growing tide of single use plastic bottle pollution and we do our bit to try and stem the tide. But on a global scale one company based in Rochester, Kent is small fry against the colossal wave of single use plastic bottles that are littering our planet.

Recycling and reusing are key to combating this modern day problem, but you can only recycle what is collected and globally just a tiny fraction of what is produced is collected for recycling. We thought we’d see which European countries are doing the best to collect the single use plastic bottles.

Germany comes out on top with 98% of all plastic bottle waste being collected closely followed by Finland at 94%, Croatia 89% and Denmark at 87% are the top four European nations but each of these have strict EU targets to meet. Here in the United Kingdom we haven’t, as yet, got anywhere near these lofty goals and the strict targets for UK collections won’t be enacted until 2024. We collect just 57% of all plastic bottles. Meaning 43% are either littering our streets and environment or end up in landfill sites.

Poorer countries around the world have even lower collection rates than the United Kingdom.

Experts in the field point out that if we want to rid the world of plastic pollution first you need to collect 100% of all single use plastic bottles before you can make any impact especially when in the time its taken to read this blogpost the world has produced another 500,000 or so new single use plastic bottles.