The UK government is being urged by campaigners to ban the export of plastic waste to all countries, invest in domestic recycling industry, and set a binding target for plastic reduction.
Activists are pushing for the environment bill to be strengthened to tackle the global plastic waste crisis more effectively.
Greenpeace wants ministers to ban all exports of plastic by 2025, and other campaigners also support the ban of all plastic waste exports, but some warned that without enough enforcement this kind of ban would be mere "headline-grabbing".
The bill contains a ban on exports of plastic waste to developing, or non-OECD, countries, but the prohibition still allows plastic waste to be sent to those developing counties that ask for it.
Sian Sutherland from A Plastic Planet, said this loophole needed to be addressed, and the bill needs to go further to end the export of plastic waste to all countries. She added that it was no coincidence that Turkey, an OECD county, had become the UK's top destination for plastic waste since it became clear to the waste industry they were no longer allowed to export to developing nations.
"We must now step up and own our own waste. We need to end the export of plastic waste to all countries".
Despite ministers' promising a "green Brexit" the UK has fallen behind Europe in the battle to tackle the global plastic waste crisis. More than half of the plastic rubbish the British government says is recycled is sent overseas, without the necessary infrastructure to deal with it in an environmentally sustainable way.
On the other hand, EU countries have enacted a ban on sending plastic packaging waste to developing countries in January.
UK exports to Turkey increased from 12,000 tonnes in 2016, to 209,642 tonnes in 2020. This week Turkey said it would ban the imports of most types of plastic waste in 45 days time after the Greenpeace revelations who found that plastic waste from leading British supermarkets was dumped, burned, piled into mountains and left to spill into rivers and the sea.
Green Alliance said these kind of exports were already a breach of the Basel Convention, which makes it illegal to export plastic waste to countries if there is a belief that it will not be handled in an environmentally sound manner. Libby Peake, Head of Resource Policy at Green Alliance, said any ban on exports would be effective only if there was an investment in monitoring and enforcement.
"What must happen is that existing and future regulations are monitored and enforced".
Peake said it was vital to invest in domestic recycling infrastructure and create systems of reuse and refill to cut back on the amount of plastic the UK uses. Sutherland said reducing the use of plastic was crucial and the bill needed a target on plastic reduction.
"There are no targets to reduce our plastic use, how can we measure this if we don't have a target to say what success is?"
The British Plastics Federation said it supported the move away from plastic waste. Stephen Hunt, the BPF Membership Services Director, said: "The environment bill will create new powers to stop exports of plastic waste to developing countries. The plastics industry supports this, and supports introducing tough measures to prevent export-related fraud, as well as enforcing existing regulations to ensure that exported plastic waste is handled in an environmentally sound manner".
"It may seem surprising, but the industry has actually been calling for years for the UK to reduce its reliance on exporting plastic waste for recycling, and the BPF’s recycling roadmap […] shows how the UK can more than halve the amount of plastic waste it exports, eliminate the export of low-quality material and reduce plastic waste going to landfill to 1% by 2030".
