Single-use packaging and carrier bags escape into the environment
#00078
Lightweight single-use items — carrier bags, food wrappers, cups, cutlery, polystyrene — are easily windblown from bins and vehicles into hedgerows, waterways and the sea, where they fragment and persist. Much of it is hard to recycle even when captured.
Parent issue
#00075 Litter accumulating in natural and public spaces
Sustainable Development Goals
Location
Description
Why this is its own facet
Lightweight single-use packaging — plastic carrier bags, crisp and sandwich wrappers, cups, lids, cutlery, expanded-polystyrene containers — is easily carried by wind and water from open bins, vehicles and pockets into hedgerows, drains, rivers and ultimately the sea. Food wrappers in particular now rival cigarette butts at the top of global litter counts.
Specific harm
Bags entangle and suffocate wildlife and clog waterways and drains (worsening flooding); thin films and foams fragment quickly into microplastics. A large share of this material is effectively unrecyclable in practice even when captured, so prevention matters far more than downstream sorting.
Why it is a distinct lever
This stream is generated overwhelmingly upstream, at the point of product and packaging design and sale. That makes it addressable through instruments aimed at producers and retailers and at the existence of the item itself — a different class of intervention from bins, cleanups or messaging.
Sub-issues
0Top solutions
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