The Plastics Bill would switch plastics recycling costs from council tax payers to retailers and manufacturers to reduce plastic pollution and cut household bills.

The Plastics Bill to be published would make retailers and producers pay for recycling instead of council tax payers to maximise pressure on producers, from both consumers and retailers, to minimise plastic packaging and maximise recyclability.

At the moment the council tax payer foots ninety per cent of the recycling costs and retailers are more concerned about how the product looks on-shelf than the environmental impact. If they have to bear the costs of recycling it will make them tell manufacturers to make more recyclable packaging with less plastic.

The Plastics Bill would also mean a welcome reduction in council tax bills as recycling costs are shifted to those who buy and make the packaging. The Plastics Bill will help to maximise reusable and sustainable packaging materials as retailers aim to reduce their costs of plastic waste and increase the revenue from recycling.

This will mean less plastic production and incineration. Communities across UK will welcome a reversal in urban incineration growth as a byproduct of the Bill. Burning plastic puts the smallest ‘nano’ particulates, which are the most damaging to health, into the atmosphere and these are the ones that escape incineration filters and enter the blood stream most lethally. These findings have been published alongside the scientific research by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Air Pollution which I chair.

Noteably the Plastics Bill introduces UK targets for aggregate production and consumption of virgin plastic akin to the the Climate Act for carbon. It also fast-tracks the UK into the Global Plastic Treaty.

The Bill also bans the export of waste plastic so that UK plastic is not burnt, landfilled and causing damage to human health and the natural environment as it currently is in destinations like Turkey. We must look after our own waste and not dump it in developing countries. However, I have also been consistently pressing for a carbon border tax that accounts for the environmental cost of imported plastic from China and elsewhere.

The Plastics Bill is a key component of green growth as it helps create a resource from a waste product whilst helping the environment.

We need to create the conditions for a flourishing recycling industry and that includes creating wealth from processing our own waste.

People care about the climate change and the natural environments they live in, especially those in coastal communities like Swansea. This Bill would set measurable targets for plastic reduction as we see in the climate change legislation and make the UK government accountable for reducing annual waste.

The UK government must take responsibility for our domestic waste, which would otherwise be exported to less wealthy nations.There are emerging technologies, including in Swansea for effective plastic recycling to produce hydrogen, and to use churning of mixed paper and plastic packaging – like in sandwich packaging – with water to separate the plastic from the cardboard so that the cardboard can be used for industrial sugar and the plastic can be recycled.

We must harness these capabilities to create a recycling framework that can deal with the plastic waste and build a cleaner, healthier environment and lead a Global Plastic Treaty.

David Attenborough’s Blue Planet has woken up the world to the scale of the problem which the UN has said will mean more plastic in our oceans than fish by 2050 if decisive action is not taken. This Bill sets out the decisive action that the UK should take to become a global leader. Not only is our natural environment at risk but there are also unknown risks to human health from the ingestion of micro plastics in our food, in particular fish, and through the air for instance from inhaling plastic fibres from clothes pumped out of tumble dryers in enclosed spaces like flats.

This is a wake-up call for retailers using too much and the wrong plastic and to sensitise the public into realising that plastic bottles and packaging are environmental hazards that need urgent control.

The world must stop subsidising petro-Chemical companies to the tune of $5.3 trillion a year – the size of the U.K. and French economies combined so that people pay the correct price for plastic and sustainable alternatives become competitive. In the meantime we must make the polluter pay in Britain and take the lead in cleaning up our act.’