By Nick Martin and Victoria Seabrook

Plastics recycling: the problem

Thousands of tons of plastic scrap collected for recycling from British households have been transported and dumped on sites across the world, a Sky News investigation has revealed.

Experts have warned there is "no other solution" for dealing with waste which is now stockpiled in countries as far away as Poland and Hong Kong than to consign it to landfill.

Dirty secret? Why is UK waste shipped abroad?

Sky News' documentary, Dirty Business, exposes a system that makes it more lucrative to export our plastic recycling than process it ourselves.

It raises concerns the system could be inflating our recycling rates and failing to channel investment into recycling here in the UK.


In an exclusive interview with Sky News, Environment Secretary Michael Gove said the UK has "been exporting too much waste".

"What we need to do is to make sure that we reduce the amount that we produce and also process more of it at home," he said.

Why are plastics exported?

The statistics on plastics usage are staggering.

Every year British households throw 22 million tons of waste into the bin. EU targets demand that we recycle half of that by 2020 - but rates are stagnating at just 44%.

:: Eco-savvy or totally rubbish? Take our plastics quiz

Cheaper land and labour abroad means a lot of our plastic is exported to be reprocessed.

But the reality is that once it leaves our shores, no one really checks whether it is recycled.

The documentary lays this truth bare, uncovering shipments of plastic wrapped in Chelmsford Council recycling bags sitting on a yard in Hong Kong, destined for landfill.

Tony Wong, the Chinese plastics trader who had imported the plastic to Hong Kong, expected to receive only clear bottles.

But the load was so contaminated with other materials, it was too expensive to sort and recycle.

Image: Plastics trader Tony Wong inspects recycling that originally came from Chelmsford

Steve Wong, who often works with Tony and is also president of the China Scrap Plastics Association, said there was "no other solution" to deal with the waste than consign it to landfill.

But Sky News has found the shipment has been registered as recycled by the exporter and therefore counted towards Britain's recycling targets.

Yet more plastics that had been exported from the UK are falling apart and polluting the environment in Poland.

It is cases like these that suggest the UK could well be "over reporting recycling rates", according to Dominic Hogg, chairman of environmental consultancy Eunomia.

Image: Shipping containers pass through a Hong Kong port

Why did China want our old plastic?

China had been importing millions of tons of plastic rubbish every year to make the toys, mats, and parts that it sells back to the rest of the world.

Britain has become heavily dependent on that appetite, sending two thirds of its plastic scrap exports to China.

But all sorts of other rubbish was mixed in with it. So in July last year the Chinese government announced it would ban imports of the world's plastics from January 2018 - under a programme called national sword.

That means the UK will have to find somewhere else to take its unwanted plastics.

"Operation national sword had a big impact in that it's almost halved the amount of plastic going to China," says Phil Conran, chair of the advisory committee on packaging for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

"That's the problem we've got with China who are saying we don't want this low quality stuff anymore. So China have closed their doors and we've going to have to find somewhere else."

At one plastic-strewn site near Bangkok,Thailand, Sky News found worrying evidence that China closing its doors will merely mean the same thing happening in other countries.

It discovered waste from everyday household goods, including Tesco and Asda milk packaging and a Whitworths raisins bag, that had apparently been there for over a year.

More concerning still was the sight of workers stood knee deep in biohazard bags, processing them with their bare hands.

Image: A worker in Thailand prepares with his bare hands biohazard bags for recycling

Who is to blame?

Chelmsford Council promised to investigate how recycling from its area had ended up stuck in a yard in Hong Kong.

The council later confirmed its recycling had been handled by companies accredited by Defra. It said it was confident that materials collected for recycling were "of high quality and free from contamination" and that its approach had "the least environmental impact" of all recycling practices.

But it will be up to Defra to handle the fallout from China's ban. In November 2017, MPs questioned the department's chief, Environment Secretary Michael Gove, on his plans to deal with the impact.

Sky's plastic fight: What's been achieved?

Mr Gove replied: "I do not know what impact it will have. It is a very good question and something to which - I will be completely honest - I have not given sufficient thought."

He later told the Sky News documentary that he was doing everything he could to "turn what is a challenge into an opportunity".

He added that the Sky News footage of recycling dumped in Hong Kong and Poland "reinforces the case for the reforms" of the recycling system that he planned to implement.

But his department had long known about the flaws in the system.

In 2015 it commissioned several briefing notes, which repeated concerns that the system lacked transparency, provided "little" benefit to local authorities and did not "encourage investment in the UK reprocessing industry".

These documents were never made public, but the programme obtained copies via a freedom of information request.

So what is the solution for Britain's plastic waste?

Recyclers, exporters and councils emphasised the importance of the public putting the right recycling in the right bins. But they called on the Government to do more to create a system the public can trust.

Industry hoped that plans would be laid out in the Government's 25-year environment plan, which was finally published in January 2017.

The plan promised to reform the relevant waste regulations but provided no detail on how it would do so. It also pledged more information in its resources and waste strategy, which is due out during 2018.

Rob Opsomer, from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, said the China ban could be an opportunity for Britain.

"It forces the UK to rethink how they deal with their plastics post-use," he said.

"It can also go the bad way. We continue exporting plastics abroad, where the infrastructure is even worse than in China, and we perhaps believe it gets recycled.

"But actually what happens there is it gets burned or it gets treated in a way that is negative for the local environment."

In the meantime, the industry is warning that we have to start taking more responsibility for our own waste, as the amount of plastics we produce soars.

Lee Clayton, managing director of Monoworld Recycling, said: "I don't think we're planning quick enough. It needs investment, it needs government support.

"We have to look at processing domestically. It's our waste, our problem, we should be recycling it."