For years, companies making misleading environmental claims faced little more than bad press. A campaign group would raise the alarm, a brand would issue a careful non-apology, and the cycle would begin again. In 2025, that changed. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came fully into force on 6 April 2025, giving the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) the power to impose fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual turnover for misleading environmental claims,...

When Britain's recycling targets are met on paper, it is worth asking: where does the plastic actually go? The answer is increasingly overseas. Chemical recycling, as we explored in the previous piece in this series, has failed to provide the domestic processing solution the industry promised. That failure has a direct consequence: plastic that cannot be recycled at home gets shipped abroad instead. In 2024 alone, the UK exported 598 million kilos of plastic waste, an increase of 30 million...

The petrochemical industry has long championed chemical recycling as the solution to the global plastics crisis. The pitch is straightforward: instead of sending plastic waste to landfill or incineration, break it down chemically back into raw materials and start again. Clean, circular, elegant. The reality is considerably messier. Chemical recycling works primarily through a process called pyrolysis. Plastic waste is heated in the absence of oxygen to produce an oil that can, in theory, be...