The Big Plastic Count is the UK’s biggest investigation into household plastic waste. The brief is simple: count your plastic waste for one week and submit your results to us online.
The campaign is engaging, empowering, and educational for both children and adults. It aims to highlight the urgency and scale of the plastic crisis while enabling people to play a part in helping to solve this pressing issue.
Not only does this initiative help participants learn about the plastic problem by generating their own personalised household plastic footprint, but their contributions also provide vital data that helps us present the true scale of the plastic crisis to decision-makers in government and business.
In partnership with Greenpeace UK, The Big Plastic Count has been successfully run twice, in 2022 and 2024, with impressive results:
The Big Plastic Count 2024: Results
In March 2024, schools, households, community groups, and businesses across the country came together to count their plastic waste for a whole week, uncovering that UK households are discarding a staggering 1.7 billion pieces of plastic each week. This collective effort highlighted the alarming scale of the plastic waste crisis in the UK.
The UK is still producing far too much plastic. As part of the UK Plastics Pact, supermarkets promised to make all their plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025. These results prove they are nowhere near that goal.
You might be shocked to learn that very little of our plastic waste actually gets recycled, while over half of it is being incinerated here in the UK - polluting the air we breathe with toxic gases.
You can read the full results by heading over to The Big Plastic Count homepage