Why we need the single use plastic ban
Did you see the news from last week?
From October 2023, restaurants, cafes and takeaways will be prohibited from supplying single-use plastic items including plates, bowls, trays and cutlery. Polystyrene cups will also be covered by the ban.
The restrictions will be extended to supermarkets in 2024.
So, why do we need this ban?
According to Defra estimates, in England, we use 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery every single year! We also use 721 million single-use plates per year. Most of these items are plastic, and we only recycle 10% of them.
If 2.7 billion pieces of cutlery were lined up they would go around the world over eight and a half times!
Read reaction to the upcoming ban from groups, including City to Sea, Keep Britain Tidy, A Plastic Planet, and the WWF on this blog: Edie blog
