People do want to recycle their Christmas waste – but the government just makes it so hard

Britain is preparing to unwrap and cook 10 million turkeys this Christmas. Whether your bird is the cheapest you can find, free-range or heritage-bred, they each have one thing in common: every single one of them will be wrapped in plastic.

Turkeys aren’t the only thing you’ll find wrapped in plastic this festive season. The ever-present flexible plastic film wraps everything from sweets to a bunch of bananas. Some 400,000 tonnes – the weight of 2,000 adult blue whales – is used every year in the UK. Of that, only 4 per cent is recycled. The rest ends up in landfill or incineration or – worse – in our oceans and natural habitats. They remain there for centuries, causing a level of environmental damage that Sir David Attenborough’s pioneering programmes have exposed in vivid colours.

The climate crisis is – at last – attracting a greater level of political attention, with every party nodding its head to the emergency in their recent election manifestos. This is obviously welcome, but reducing carbon emissions will not – alone – make developed economies sustainable for the planet they inhabit.

The sea-life on which our ecosystems depend is being poisoned and suffocated by countless wisps of thin plastic film. These are so ubiquitous that they can be found at the farthest reaches of the Earth – even in remote, Arctic sea ice. And they all started out in our supermarkets, in our fridges and, finally, in our bins.

Since advent and an election have coincided for the first time since 1923, this is a good moment to ask what the new Conservative government can do to help. Of course, behaviour change among the public is critical – and so many people are already showing the way by drinking from reusable cups, shopping in plastic-free aisles and reusing shopping bags. But this individual action must now drive government to what is needed most: system change.

Flexible plastic film – more than any other plastic – presents an environmental problem and needs to be recognised as such in Westminster. Because it often has food waste stuck to it, placing it in a recycling stream is impossible. The only long-term answer is to replace this film with compostable materials.

Modern compostable packaging is made up, increasingly, of bio-based polymers, which safely compost in industrial composters of the kind used by local authorities to manage other food waste. Many are suitable for home composting too. These materials – unlike those they are replacing – can be returned to the earth at roughly the same pace as organic waste: in about 180 days.

With only one in three people presently confident they are using the right bins for the right waste, we should develop simple rules: compostable films and rigids to go in the composter alongside food.

By 2023, the UK could have the capacity for nationwide collection of compostable packaging along with organic waste. Brands are increasingly signalling their willingness to change for the better. But to achieve a transformational shift on this scale will require more than market forces. First, government must make or catalyse urgent investment in the infrastructure necessary to process compostable waste; second, it must engage in a serious programme of education to inform the public; and third, it must deploy regulation. Without government support, even the best intentions fall flat.

Plastic film will not just float out of our lives without legislation to stop it wrapping all the products from loo roll to Christmas leftovers. There will – of course – be resistance. Yet whichever parties are prepared to invest some capital – political and financial – in returning packaging to the earth, rather than dumping it in the sea, will have public opinion on their side. If political leaders take immediate action, hopefully, we’ll have less waste by next Christmas.

Daphna Nissenbaum is co-founder and chief executive of Tipa, a manufacturer of compostable packaging