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Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman John Pugh speaks to ePolitix.com about why the waste disposal authorities must do more to encourage the recycling of plastics.

Question: What issues will you discuss in the Westminster Hall debate on the recycling of plastics?

Pugh: It's very much in the air at the moment, the issue of plastics and recycling, but I don't think there's a great deal of clear thought around. Most householders, I think, would like to recycle plastics. Plastics though are quite complicated to recycle and it's not always economical to accept at the kerbside.

Often people have to travel to put their plastics in containers at the car park or wherever. What I'm trying to do is take a strategic look at where we're going on this because it seems to me if plastics are ever to be economically recycled we need to have the kind of provision that you have in Hampshire, for example, to crush and separate our plastics, which doesn't exist in many other parts of the country.

In consequence, what is recycled by virtuous housekeepers and householders is basically going to waste and is not useable even though plastics as a material is eminently recyclable. So we need waste disposal authorities to take a grip of the matter.

Many of them have strategic plans that they're putting forward at the moment, many of them have large investments that they're on the cusp of putting in. I'm suggesting that Defra and the government need to take an overview of this and encourage the waste disposal authorities to provide the support and infrastructure to enable plastic recycling to be as profitable as other forms of recycling can sometimes be. It's not there at the moment and I think we've got some way to go.

Question: How can recycling be made easier for householders?

Pugh: It was only the other day when I discovered that all plastics are actually branded and have numbers on them, put there I believe at the instruction of the European Union of all people, which actually tell us what materials they are and what kind of waste stream they ought to go into.

Most people when they hear the word plastics don't really think in terms of type of plastics - they just think generically in terms of plastics - are likely to throw all commodities into the same disposal route.

Resultantly, this leads to a mess coming out the other end that's not economically rescuable. Some local authorities are going down the road of collecting particular types of plastic and telling the public about them, notably bottles and containers like that. But even so, there's public confusion out there.

I think the public are willing to be educated, I think the public can be educated, but there's no good separating out the plastic waste stream if we don't then have a way of reusing it, a way of marketing it, a whole organised network in place to make sure that this eminently recyclable material gets used and reused as well as possible.

I'll also want to be touching on the issue of where the government are going on the plastic bag tax and what the waiting is for recycling as opposed to other uses of plastic. For example, there is some feeling that residual plastic is best used as a material for combustion, there is some plastic which is ground up and put in roads and things like that.

There are a whole range of different uses for plastic. What I'm identifying and hoping to point to in the debate is a certain amount of confusion on this issue. Although we talk the talk and are all signed up to recycling and reusing our plastics, there isn't a system in place to actually ensure that is even done in a moderately efficient way.

And I come from a borough where the residual waste bin contains about 50 per cent plastic and the public would love to be able to put their plastic into a recycling stream but sadly it doesn't turn out to be economically possible for the local authority currently to do that because they're not properly plugged into the market. Worse still, the waste disposal authority hasn't got the means to make as much use as it might of the raw material that's produced.

Question: What measures would you propose for reducing the amount of carrier bags sent to landfill?

Pugh: I think supermarket reuse is very important and most of the supermarkets are very actively doing that and I think most plastic bags do get used a fair few times. That being said, there is the pointless issuing of plastic bags. Dare I say, I was in WH Smith the other day and pretty much everybody who didn't have simply one item was offered a plastic bag.

The Sunday newspapers, as I pointed out to the minister before now, come wrapped in a one-use plastic bag. There are lots of occasions where one-use plastic bag is almost encouraged by the retail trade and there's got to be a disincentive for them to do that. Whether a tax is the right idea, well I'm not sure about that, but we certainly need to exert a downward pressure.

My real fear, and I think this is true of a lot of environmental matters, is that we talk very boldly about this and broadly about this but we don't do the practical things. And sometimes, some of the things we do aren't practical at all. If for example, we were to move wholesale from packaging things in paper rather than in plastic, we'd add to the weight of goods as they got carried around the country and in doing that we are increasing our carbon footprint.

There's a lot of serious thought needed here, a lot of sensible planning where the public sector has got to play a positive lead. At the moment, there isn't a great deal of evidence that they are doing that in a coherent way.

There are, as I say, certain local authorities like Hampshire who seem to have thought things out from a long way back, and there are other local authorities who are jumping to the latest tune but are not entirely certain what they're doing or why they're doing it and I hope to encourage them to do a little bit better.