Tonight

Cornwall resident Johanna Oates Koomen began storing plastic waste such as food trays, yoghurt pots and margarine tubs because her council said they didn’t have the facility to recycle them and she didn’t want to see it end up in landfill.

Seven and a half years later, the plastic has now taken over the household study.

“When we came to live in Cornwall I decided to just put the plastic that is not being recycled I thought I’ll put in a box and one day someone will come up with the idea to recycle that and the box became bigger and bigger,” says Johanna.

“It’s basically that we as human beings are swamped with plastic, where ever you go there is a plastic issue. We talk about it all the time, we see it on television and I feel that we’ve got to swim out of this plastic waste and it can be done because we didn’t live with plastic all the time.”

Britain dumps more household waste in landfill than nearly all the other countries in the EU (only Greece and Portugal dump more).

Six million tonnes of packaging enters the household waste stream in the UK every year of which 4.7 million tonnes is food related packaging.

And although food retailers have been under pressure to reduce the amount of packaging they use, a Local Government Association report found this February that almost 40 per cent of supermarket food packaging cannot be easily recycled. It claimed that excessive food packaging used by supermarkets is undermining householders’ efforts to recycle more and is adding to council tax bills.

In this programme, Tonight takes on the challenge of trying to find a green home for Johanna’s seven years’ worth of plastic.

The programme makers travel the length and breadth of the country with the Tonight wheelie bin in tow in a bid to find someone who can recycle the plastic responsibly – from one of the UK’s biggest plastics recyclers to one of its greenest councils.

When this proves impossible our efforts turn to examining how and why we are generating all of this packaging waste in the first place and seeing if more could be done to cut down on the amounts being generated.

What are the alternatives to people being charged by their councils for the costs of landfilling excess packaging, a lot of which they probably didn’t want in the first place?

Could and should retailers such as the big supermarket chains be doing more?

It’s a journey that encompasses Britain’s first plastic bag free town, a German supermarket chain where customers can leave all their packaging at the till before taking their shopping home and a Gloucestershire family who are trying to go a whole week without generating any rubbish.

Last edited: Wednesday, 18 February 2009