We’ve created our series Eco HomeLife Explains to provide bite-sized information around the topic of sustainability for everyone interested in living a more sustainable life. In this edition, we look at why plastic waste is so bad for our planet.
Plastic is everywhere, so it’s no surprise that we produce a huge amount of plastic waste. According to Statista, UK households dispose of 90 billion pieces of plastic every year.
That’s a staggering 1.7 billion items per week.
The amounts in the UK alone are huge, and give us a glimpse into why plastic waste is bad for the environment. But the sheer volume isn’t the only problem. So let’s dive into it…
5 Reasons Why Plastic Waste Is Bad For The Environment
There isn’t just one reason why waste from plastic items is bad for our planet, which makes the picture more complex. Here are the 5 main reasons it has such a huge impact on our environment:
- What plastic is made of
- There is just too much plastic
- Challenges with recycling of plastic
- Behaviour of plastic in landfill
- Mismanagement of plastic waste – plastic pollution
To give you the full picture, we will look at each of these in more detail.
1. Plastic Is Made Of Fossil Fuels
To understand why plastic waste has a negative impact on our environment, we have to first look at how plastic is made. Because before it can become waste, it has to be made, right?
The vast majority of plastic is made from fossil fuels. A report by the Centre of International Environmental Law (CIEL) said that over 99% of the plastic we use is made from this unsustainable source.
There are several issue with the use of fossil fuels to make plastic.
Extraction causes loss of habitat (Butt et al., 2013), pollution (Govorushko,2013, Barbir et al., 1990), and waste production (Ortega-Ramirez et al., 2022).
Plastic production from fossil fuels is estimated to be responsible for 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according the UN. And this figure is set to increase threefold by 2060.
So both, getting the source material and then producing the plastic has a huge environmental impact, driving global warming and climate change.
2. Plastic Consumption Is Astronomical
We have already said that the amount of plastic waste the world produces is unfathomable, with 90 billion pieces of plastic being produced by UK households per year alone.
The reason there is so much plastic waste is that it’s one of the most widely used materials today, according to the European Environment Agency. Because it’s cheap to make and versatile in its uses, it has conquered our world.
Since the 1950s, when plastic production began in earnest, the volume has increased 230-fold in 2019, when 460 million tonnes were produced, according to Our World In Data. And the trend is upwards, with Our World In Data predicting the production of 1.23 billion tonnes of plastic by 2060.
One of the biggest contributors to plastic waste are disposable and single-use plastic items. These are items that are used once or maybe a few times before being disposed of.
Examples include balloons, wipes, cigarette filters, floss picks, cleaning sponges, cling film, plastic packaging, food wrappers, plastic bottles, plastic bags, etc.
The nature of single-use plastics means that they drive plastic production, as well as plastic waste.
As we will see, coping with such amounts of plastic waste isn’t easy and there are concerns that we are drowning in plastic. But can’t plastic be recycled? Well…
3. Recycling Plastic Isn’t As Simple As It May Seem
Although most types of plastic are recyclable, which means they don’t need to become waste, it’s not as simple as it looks at first. Here’s why…
According to the UN’s Development Programme (UNDP), there are three main reasons why much of the plastic waste we put into our recycling bin won’t get recycled:
- Contamination – if the plastic waste is contaminated with items that can’t be recycled, labels, leftover food, etc. it can’t be recycled and the whole load ends up in landfill
- Hazardous chemicals – many plastic items contain harmful chemicals that pose a risk to workers and the end-user if recycled, so they aren’t
- Too expensive – each type of plastic has different needs to be recycled, so it’s not possible to recycle everything as creating the necessary infrastructure is just too costly
On top of that, there is simply too much plastic waste for the current recycling infrastructure to cope with. Greenpeace’s most recent figures released in 2024 from their Big Plastic Count found that only 17% of plastic waste was recycled in the UK.
The rest was sent abroad (14%), to countries that have even poorer recycling infrastructure than the UK; incinerated for energy consumption (58%); or sent to landfill (11%).
Incineration of plastic is in itself a bad thing for the environment, as it releases toxic chemicals (Alabi et al., 2019), as well as microplastics into the environment (Yang et al., 2020).
We get to the issues with sending plastic to landfill later.
The other issue with recycling plastic is that it’s not a long-term solution. Plastic can be recycled two maybe three times. Some plastics only get recycled once, because the recycling process reduces its quality.
So sooner rather than later every plastic will become waste and end up in landfill.
4. The Impacts Of Plastic In Landfill
As we have seen, a fair amount of plastic waste ends up in landfill. This is partly because it can’t be recycled, partly because the recycling facilities haven’t enough capacity.
We have long known that any waste in landfill has an impact on our environment, as it’s responsible for the release of landfill gases as well as leachate. These can lead to air, water and ground pollution. (El-Fadel et al., 1995)
The main landfill gases that are released are methane and carbon dioxide (Danthurebandara et al., 2013) two greenhouse gases that are responsible for global warming and climate change.
The substances that can leak from landfills into our soil, groundwater and air include very harmful and toxic chemicals, causing great harm to our environment as well as human health. (Vaverková 2019)
Plastic in landfill adds more issues, for one because plastic can take hundreds if not thousands of years to break down (Chamas et al., 2020). As it breaks down, plastic released toxic chemicals and microplastics. (Wojnowska-Baryla et al., 2022)
These microplastics can reach our environment through the air or via leachate from landfills. And once in our environment, these tiny pieces of plastic cause huge harm to our wildlife. (Kärrman et al., 2016)
And like other waste, plastic waste also release greenhouse gases as it breaks down (Royer et al., 2018), contributing to climate change.
Given the amounts of plastic we produce and throw away every year, the problem is only going to get bigger, unless we reduce our use of plastic.
5. Plastic Pollution
So far, we have talked about managed plastic waste, that is recycled, thrown in landfill or sent to other countries. But quite a lot of it ends up in our environment through mismanagement, including being littered.
The Natural History Museum estimates that 52 million tonnes of plastic make it into our environment each year. And the vast majority of items that are littered are single-use plastics.
Data from Business Waste suggests that 70% of all littered items are food packaging and wrappers. It’s certainly the type of litter I regularly see out on my morning run, together with drinks bottles and cans.
The climate charity Surfers Against Sewage reported that 11 million tonnes of plastic reach our oceans each year.
Once in the environment, the plastic plastic behaves similar to the way it behaves in landfill. It releases toxic chemicals, microplastics, and greenhouse gases. But while in landfills there is some sort of management, in the environment, there isn’t.
Besides, the items themselves can harm wildlife. Plastic in our oceans can entangle wildlife, causing it to drown (Kühn et al., 2015). On land, it can lead to horrific injuries and even death.
When wildlife eats plastics that it finds lying or swimming around, it can lead to malnutrition, starvation, or chocking.
The Only Way Is Reduction
After reading this, there can be no doubt any more why plastic waste is bad for the environment. So what’s the solution?
We need governments and leaders to pass laws and develop policies to reduce the amount of plastic that is used. We need to ensure that plastic is disposed of in the least harmful way to our environment. Scientists are already working on this.
We need big manufactures of plastic items to take responsibility for their disposal and a reduction of the use of this harmful material.
Given that plastic can last for hundreds of years, the only way is to reduce the amount of plastic we use. This will in turn reduce the amount of plastic waste. That’s the long-term solution, which we need to start enacting now.
Governments, industry, big corporations all have their role to play, but we can also do something. While it’s impossible for us, as individuals, to avoid plastic completely, we can reduce the amount we use and have in our homes by quite a bit.
Our top 10 plastic-free swaps can give you a starting point.
The good news is, that these swaps are simple and small, but can have a big and immediate impact. Other things we can do include:
- Avoid single-use plastics
- Organise or join regular litter picks in our areas
- Avoid littering
- Educate our friends and family about the need to reduce plastic use
- Become conscious consumers and move away from overconsumption, not just in terms of plastic
- Develop a sustainability mindset to live a more sustainable life
Why not give these things a go and do your bit to reduce plastic waste?
