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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps he is taking to encourage other countries to develop policies to tackle plastic waste.

Defra and the Department for International Development (DFID) fund alongside other countries the $4.43 billion Global Environment Facility sixth replenishment (2014–18), which has a programme to tackle marine plastic pollution and a number of other projects to improve waste management more broadly. Defra and DFID are working jointly on what more can be done to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering the oceans, including through UK aid.

In addition, the UK works through other fora such as the United Nations, G7, G20 and the Oslo and Paris Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic to tackle waste and reduce the impact of plastics.