Five hundred tonnes of Christmas tree lights and at least 25-million bags of plastic sweet wrappers, turkey coverings, drinks bottles and broken toys were to be thrown away by British homes this Christmas and New Year. But only a tiny proportion of this festive plastic waste was expected to be recycled.
According to a survey by home drinks-makers SodaStream, less than 25% of the UK's plastic waste is recycled during the year, but even more remains un-recycled over the festive period. Globally, the plastics recycling is even smaller. South Africa recycles about 17% of plastic, 69% of steel beverage cans, 59% of paper and about 25% of glass, according to data from various local recycling initiatives. The European Packaging and Films Association says that 265-million tonnes of plastic are produced globally each year. Even at the superior European Union recycling rate of 33%, two-thirds of that, or more than 113-million tonnes, would end up in landfill, being burned, or cluttering up the environment in which people and wildlife live.
But what would this world look like without plastic? According to Mail & Guardian Online, Austrian-based environmental consultancy Denkstatt imagined a world in which farmers, retailers and consumers use wood, metal tins, glass bottles and jars and cardboard to cover their goods. It found the mass of packaging would increase by 3.6 times, it would take more than double the energy to make and the greenhouse gases generated would be 2.7 times higher. Because of the huge carbon content of our diets, it is estimated that for every tonne of carbon produced by making plastic, five tonnes is saved, said Barry Turner of the packaging association. Even more surprisingly, Friends of the Earth's waste campaigner Julian Kirby, said that because it is inert in landfill, plastic waste buried in the ground "sequesters" carbon, preventing it from adding to global warming and climate change.
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