'Save the environment for everyone' - Keep Britain Tidy manifesto lobbies those in power

Keep Britain Tidy today called for politicians to prioritise a deposit return scheme, commit to quality green space for all and make polluters pay as it published its manifesto ahead of the political party conference season.

We are encouraging all parties to protect and transform local environments by encompassing its three critical demands for change in their own policies going into the next election.

The changes we need are straightforward but significant. 

We want to see our broken waste system fixed so that litter and fly-tipping no longer blight communities, with a deposit return scheme to cut the number of bottles that are buried, burnt or littered and initiatives to penalise polluters who produce packaging that is hard or impossible to recycle easily.

We also believe our essential green and blue spaces – parks, beaches, rivers and canals – which are so important to biodiversity, climate change mitigation and health and wellbeing, need investment to allow them to flourish rather than fall into disrepair in front of our eyes.

The manifesto highlights how our planet is drowning in plastic and waste, global warming is having a devastating impact on communities worldwide and, since the 1970s, the UK has lost almost half of its biodiversity, ranking at the bottom of the G7. 

Keep Britain Tidy is more focused than ever on its mission to tackle local environmental damage from the ground up because we believe everyone has the right to love where they live. 

We need to introduce a deposit return scheme now to tackle the twenty million drink containers that are littered, incinerated or end up in landfill every day – more than seven billion wasted every year. 

More than 70% of litter, by volume, is drink containers, so a DRS is the single biggest action to cut littering that any government could take, reducing the impact of litter on people and wildlife and, ultimately, cutting off some of the endless deluge of waste that is turning our oceans into a plastic soup.

We need a commitment to quality green space for all to benefit almost half a million people in our most deprived neighbourhoods who live in ‘grey deserts’ with no trees or accessible green space. Public Health England says that access for all to quality green space would save £2.1 billion a year in health costs, but 75% of those living in our most deprived communities do not have it and funding for parks has been cut by £690 million since 2010. 

And we need to make polluters pay for poor packaging that is hard or impossible to recycle easily and often ends up polluting our countryside,  waterways and seas, while costing councils more than £2 billion every year dealing with litter and fly-tipping. 

The UK generated a shocking 2.5 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste in 2021 but recycled less than half of it. We cannot allow this appalling waste of resources to continue. 

You can read our full manifesto here.