The average family spends £470 each year just on packaging for goods they purchase. There is the cost of disposing of it – as well as paying our local Councils to collect our rubbish, we’re now paying extra for whatever isn’t recycled. Every household is paying £30 a year in landfill taxes alone.
Then, there’s the environmental cost; any packaging we don’t recycle goes into landfill, which produces the greenhouse gas methane. Decomposing packaging waste alone produces 30,000 tonnes of this gas each year, which has the same effect on global warming as the annual emissions of 100,000 cars.
Excessive packaging is wasteful, expensive and damaging to our planet. And yet yesterday, this “greenest government ever” ruled out taking tougher measures to reduce the volume of excess packaging. They also ruled out bringing back the ‘bottle deposit’ scheme that used to exist claiming it would be too expensive.
This “green government” is failing on the environment.
Press article here, Jo Swinson MP is still running a campaign on excess packaging that can be viewed here.
