Plastic Petition pushes for greater transparency in UK recycling system

British health brand BetterYou is campaigning for positive environmental change, and you could be part of it!

The company recently launched its Plastic Petition, demanding a national and unified programme for waste plastic collection and recycling across England.

According to a 2019 YouGov poll, ‘confusing rules’ are one of the biggest issues that keep Brits from recycling effectively, with one in 20 saying they won’t recycle anymore until they’re confident that items they send for recycling will be properly recycled, rather than sent to landfill.

What’s more, BBC News reported last year that in the 12 months to March 2019, 50 councils across the country incinerated more than half of the household rubbish that they collected, including paper and plastic. Unsurprisingly, it’s causing increasing concerns for Brits who are trying to take responsibility for their recycling.

It’s worrying statistics like these that have led BetterYou to push for more transparency, urging the government to improve its policies in a bid to create an effective recycling lifecycle.

“There is no synergy, no clarity and certainly no universal performance standard to be measured by within the UK’s current recycling policy,” BetterYou founder and managing director, Andrew Thomas, said. “Many of us diligently separate our waste plastics, yet this very waste may still be contributing to an environmental disaster on a scale never before seen.

“I believe that the incomprehensible and poorly communicated ways in which recycling is collected across the UK has unsurprisingly reduced the public’s compliance to plastic recycling – if you make a process confusing enough, people will eventually stop doing it.

“Our government is not acting decisively enough to ensure more of our waste plastic is collected and recycled, so we must insist that local and national government work together towards a more effective and self-sustaining plastic recycling programme to reduce and start to repair our environmental impact.

“That’s why our newly launched Plastic Petition is so important. The petition demands a single and universally adopted recycling programme which every local authority should sign up to; a programme which is standardised, independently monitored, and publicly reviewed annually. It proposes that all local authorities are governed, monitored, and reviewed equally, upholding an agreed best practice programme for collection and recycling.”

To find out more about BetterYou’s environmental initiatives, visit betteryou.com/better-planet-project or click here to sign the petition.

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