Environment Secretary Therese Coffey has proposed a ban on wet wipes containing plastic fibres – but do you agree?
A life-saver for parents up and down the country, the moist towelettes may be a common sight in handbags and strewn across car dashboards – but they also happen to be very bad for the environment.
They make up around 90 per cent of the material causing sewer blockages, and when combined with restaurant and home cooking oil waste, they end up forming vast ‘fatbergs’.
Ministers are under mounting pressure to stop rubbish and sewage polluting Britain’s rivers and coastline, and this latest attempt to ditch plastic-toting wet wipes is now the third time Tories have tried to push it through.
Then-environment secretary Michael Gove first raised the idea in May 2018, before it was proposed again by George Eustice in November 2021 when he held the post.
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Boots last year announced it would stop selling wet wipes containing plastic fibres because of concerns about their environmental impact.
The retailer sold more than 800million wet wipes a year.
A large proportion of the 11 billion wipes used in the UK per annum contain some form of plastic and thousands are found on beaches, according to the Marine Conservation Society.
Boots has reformulated its own wipes to remove plastic in favour of plant-based biodegradable alternatives and other manufacturers are doing the same.