The UK’s plastic packaging industry is a significant contributor to environmental and societal concerns, with only 44.2% of plastics recovered and recycled annually. This poses a significant challenge in waste management and reduction. The Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives waste research aimed to understand existing waste management perspectives and practices in the UK, considering attitude and behaviour gaps, disposal pathways, technologies, practices, and people, with a view to developing more effective strategies to help deliver on Government commitments to reduce waste, increase resource efficiency, and develop a circular economy for resource utilisation in order to address the climate crisis and reach net zero emissions by 2050. We engaged with 128 professionals and 65 organisations who provided insights into waste collection, handling, sorting, recycling, packaging production, food packaging use, policy and compliance. Amongst our findings, we identified two opposing scenarios for better or worse plastics recycling outcomes. The ideal scenario involves predictable waste streams, well-known materials, in easy-to-manage processes that can produce recycled content for highquality end uses, in compliance with policy aims at sustainable market prices and costs. The worst-case scenario involves uncontrolled and inconsistent waste, litter and contamination, negative impacts on the environment, in processes that are difficult to manage and sustain. From waste management workers’ perspectives, consumers are an important group impacting these ideal/worst-case scenarios primarily through: their purchase choices of packaging; their potential willingness to buy packaging that includes recycled content; how they prepare and present waste for recycling; and how they wash and separate packaging into different containers and streams for residual waste and recycling, including an understanding that there are different types of plastics and not all can be recycled (yet) in the same stream. However, consumers are only one variable – albeit an important one – between the ‘ideal’ and ‘worst-case’ scenarios. The influence of other actors in the lifecycle of plastics is important to understand. ATTITUDE-BEHAVIOUR GAPS We identified three ways in which consumer attitudes and behaviours did not correspond to each other, undermining the move to realising the ideal scenario. Attitude: Plastic is bad because it is harmful, therefore moving away from plastic packaging would create less harm. Behaviour: Consumers purchase new alternative packaging, for example packaging marketed as biodegradable, or packaging that looks (possibly wrongly) to be made only from paper or card. Gap: New materials and forms of packaging generate new problems for the waste management and polymer recycling value chain, principally in sorting and separating, which need solving if less environmental damage and greater sustainability are to be achieved. The first consumer attitude-behaviour gap appears to be driven largely by societal narratives surrounding plastics, such as the Blue Planet effect. To address this gap, there are two opportunities: initiating a wider public debate around the role of packaging, to promote a better understanding of its function for food protection, the wider environmental impacts of all types of 16 | @Nifty Fox Creative 2024
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