367 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year.

Over the past six years, enough plastic has been made to cover every square metre of Ireland with an inch of solid plastic.

Enough plastic has been made to last until the end of time. Here's how we stop making plastic 🧵👇

At the moment, it's cheaper to use virgin plastics than recycled plastics.

We need to incentivise the use of recycled plastics by making virgin plastics much more expensive.

Introducing a tax on virgin plastics products would create demand for recycled plastics.

If a manufacturer had to pay a 100% tax on the non-recycled material in their products.

Then manufacturers would be scouring the world looking for recycled materials to use in their products.

And recycling plants would fight to expand and get their hands on your plastic waste.

Let's make the market work for the environment.

We live in a market economy; whether we like it or not, the quickest way to get big things done is to harness the market.

Governments could quickly put taxes that incentivise companies to use recycled materials in place.

Are any governments doing this?

Several countries, including the UK and the EU, have packaging taxes.

These taxes are a start, but they don't go far enough—tax's need to cover all plastics and be high enough to generate a market for waste materials.

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