This is the fifteenth in a series of articles from the Eco Team at St Columba’s, which are also published in our church magazine.

Across the UK, 70,000 people took part in The Big Plastic Count in March this year. Did you? Over 1.5 million pieces of plastic were counted, gathering vital data on UK household plastic waste. From the data collected it was estimated that UK households throw away an estimated 82 billion pieces of plastic packaging every year! Moreover, most of it isn’t even recycled.

The figures are 59% burned, 16% shipped abroad (WHY!), 16% recycled and 9% buried.

Over half of it is burned, right here in the UK. I don’t know about you – but that makes me feel enraged! Burning pollutes the air and produces carbon dioxide that  worsens climate change.

It was also discovered that a staggering 82% of UK household plastic waste comes from food and drink packaging – a lot of that plastic from fruit and vegetables.

In fact, UK households throw away an estimated 13 billion pieces of plastic packaging from fruit and vegetables every year.

If apples, bananas and potatoes were sold loose we’d save an estimated 8,800 tonnes of plastic packaging per year.

To me, that’s staggering. More supermarkets are using packaging that can be recycled. But it’s up to us to make sure we recycle it and also, perhaps move over to sourcing loose vegetables and fruit. I take net drawstring bags with me when shopping to put in loose produce whenever possible.

If we make less plastic, we burn less plastic.