Plastics recycling in the UK is carried out on two levels - from the home, and from business and industry.

On the household front, efforts currently focus on the collection of bottles, ranging from milk bottles (HDPE) to soft drinks bottles (PET). According to plastics recycling body Recoup, 182,000 tonnes of plastic was collected for recycling by councils in 2007.

Increasingly, local authorities are responding to the pleas of residents to allow them to recycle mixed plastics, such as yoghurt pots, but the practice is still relatively rare due to the volatility of end markets and lack of UK processing capacity for mixed plastic material.

In the industrial and commercial sector, off-cuts are recycled from plastics factories and the manufacturing sector while plastic film used to wrap goods is usually collected, baled and sent for reprocessing.

Another area which produces a large amount of plastic is the agricultural sector, which generates film. Non-packaging plastic film in this sector accounts for around 85,000 tonnes of the plastic disposed of each year and there has been talk of Defra (The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) introducing a producer responsibility scheme to encourage its collection and recovery.

Plastics recycling in the UK is strongly dependent on the export market, with a large amount of demand for material coming from the Far East. WRAP (the Waste & Resources Action Programme) claims that dependence on the export market has grown ninefold in the past seven years, which leaves the domestic market susceptible to outsider influence and potential crashes like the one seen at the end of 2008.

The lack of strong internal infrastructure has started to lead to substantial investment in developing domestic plastic recycling capacity by companies such as J&A Young of Leicester, Closed Loop Recycling London, and AWS Ecoplastics in Newcastle.

In particular, plants such as Closed Loop London have developed facilities to recycle plastic food packaging back into food-grade material – which is attracting growing interest from the commercial sector.

Mixed plastics have become an area of increased interest recently, with WRAP commissioning more research into collection and processing.

However, one of the issues facing the sector is that, because waste plastics usually have a high calorific value, there is considerable debate over whether or not the best route for some mixed plastics is incineration for energy recovery rather than recycling.

A Quality Protocol for non-packaging plastic was launched by WRAP and the Environment Agency in December 2007 in a bid to quantify when non-packaging plastic ceases to be waste.