A sustainability expert from Kingston University has agreed that recycling plastics will not resolve the global waste problem, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson told schoolchildren at a Downing Street press conference that recycling doesn’t work.

Dr Paul Micklethwaite, Course Leader of MA Sustainable Design at Kingston University and an expert in design for social innovation, said recycling plastic materials does not address the underlying challenge of over consumption that is impacting on the environment.

“We should seek to reduce our production of waste in the first place, then seek to directly reuse what we do generate, and only then consider recycling,” Dr Micklethwaite said. “Recycling systems use energy and require transportation and need us to keep different types of material separated – something we are just not very good at.

“It treats the symptom and not the cause and does not address the underlying challenge of our over consumption of resources. Recycling can fool us into thinking our consumption doesn’t need to be reduced because there’s always someone to take it away. But there is no ‘away’, as the growing concentration of ocean plastic shows.”

Dr Micklethwaite, whose recent book Beyond Recycling argues that recycling is not the answer, added that we need to design out recycling as much as possible from our approach to material waste.