Environmental campaigners City to Sea are urging the Government to scale up their plans. In 2016 City to Sea ran a successful campaign to get retailers to stop selling cotton buds, which saved 478 tonnes of plastic a year.
Rebecca Burgess, chief executive of City to Sea, said: “Government will rightly be receiving plaudits for the banning of some of the worst items that cause plastic pollution. But a lot of this is just playing catch up with what the private sector and what other governments are already doing.”
Food giants McDonald’s already moved away from plastic straws two years ago as the restaurant chain was using 1.8 million plastic straws a day in the UK.
Burgess continued: “Its time Government sucked it up and came clean with the public – these measures are a drop in a plastic polluted ocean, and they need to quickly scale up their plans as a matter of urgency.
“If Government is serious about tackling plastic pollution there is a series of measures already drafted in the Phase-Out of Plastic Pollution Bill that they could co-opt into the Environment Bill with cross-party support. Instead they are opting for a piecemeal approach that lacks the urgency that this crisis demands.”
To coincide with the Government ban, City to Sea are launching their free to use refill app which helps people find places to refill their coffee cup with the aim of shunning single-use plastic for good.