Ministers continue to fight against plastic waste to protect natural environments and marine wildlife.
A ban on supplying plastic straws, cotton buds, and stirrers in England came into force on 1 October, in the latest attempt to mitigate the effect of plastic pollution on the environment. The ban follows an announcement in August that the charge for single-use plastic bags in England would be doubled to 10 pence (around 13 cents) from April next year.
Official estimates show that each year, people in England use 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers, and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds. A large number of these end up in the ocean, it said, harming wildlife and the environment.
“Single-use plastics cause real devastation to the environment and this government is firmly committed to tackling this issue head-on,” said George Eustice, the UK’s environment secretary.
The government will also introduce a new world-leading tax on plastic packaging which does not meet a minimum threshold of at least 30% recycled content from April 2022 to encourage greater use of recycled plastic. The business, whose brands include Dove, Ben & Jerry’s and Lipton, said it would achieve this by cutting its “absolute use of plastic packaging” by over 100,000 metric tons and “accelerating its use of recycled plastic.”
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