Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what the cost to public purse is for China and other countries to take delivery of plastic waste from the UK.

There is no cost to the public purse when local authorities or waste operators send recycled plastics to China and other countries to be reprocessed as they are exported as commodities with a commercial value. The Environment Agency spent £559,000 investigating, preventing and stopping illegal exports in 2016/17.