Scrapping the plastic

Do you still have single-use plastic cups, cutlery, plates, or drinking straws in your church cupboards? Time to get rid of them.

The Environmental Protection (Single-use Plastic Products) (Wales) Act came into force on 30th October.

Since then, it has been against the law for churches to supply the following single-use plastic items, even if giving them away free:

• Single-use plastic plates – this includes paper plates with a laminated plastic surface
• Single-use plastic cutlery – for example forks, spoons, knives
• Single-use plastic drinks stirrers
• Cups made of expanded or foamed extruded polystyrene.
• Takeaway food containers made of expanded or foamed extruded polystyrene
• Single-use plastic balloon sticks
• Single-use plastic-stemmed Cotton buds
• Single-use plastic drinking straws – with exemptions so people who need them to eat and drink safely and independently can continue to have them

And that’s just Phase One. Phase Two, to be enforced by Spring 2026, will add other items, such as carrier bags, to the list.

Getting rid of them is not as easy as you might think. Many councils will not collect these items as part of their recycling schemes. This means they will probably end up in the general waste collection and from there into landfill.

Single-use plastic degrades very slowly and forms tiny microplastic particles; it never disappears. The good news, however, is that there are plenty of biodegradable alternatives to single-use plastic.