A plastic recycling industry potentially worth £2bn and 5,000 jobs is dying in the UK because of government failure to close a loophole that allows 600,000 tonnes of plastic waste to be exported each year.

The Guardian can reveal that in the past two years 21 plastic recycling and processing factories across the UK have shut down due to the scale of exports, the cheap price of virgin plastic and an influx of cheap plastic from Asia, according to data gathered by industry insiders.

Britain’s exports of plastic waste to developing countries increased by 84% in the first half of this year, in what critics say is unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism.

In particular, UK exports soared to Indonesia – a country struggling with an environmental crisis from plastic pollution – amounting to more than 24,000 tonnes. The total plastic waste exports in the first half of the year came to 317,747 tonnes.

Used packaging being sorted at a recycling centre in London. Across the country 21 such factories have closed in the past two years. Photograph: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

Exporting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste to countries without the capability to process it properly increases the chance of serious environmental pollution as well as putting the lives of waste workers at risk.

James Mcleary, the managing director of Biffa polymers, said the industry was facing challenges and units were closing across the country.

Plastic recycling facilities that have closed in the past two years include Biffa’s Sunderland factory, which had capacity to process 39,000 tonnes each year of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) plastic – used in packaging – and three Viridor facilities. Vanden Recycling is also closing its plastics processing site in Whittlesey, Peterborough.

Keeping the waste material collected from households within the UK to be cleaned, sorted, processed and turned into recycled products, is better environmentally, captures the carbon within the plastic, and creates jobs and growth, experts say.

But policymakers have not made the key changes needed to stop incentivising plastic waste exports.

I don’t want to wonder if there is a boy whose life has been wasted somewhere because of me throwing something in a bin

Mcleary said the continued export of waste plastic should be an affront to our civilised society. He cited the deaths of 200 young people in Turkey that were exposed earlier this year by ISIG Meclisi, which carried out the first analysis of workplace deaths in the country’s recycling industry. The UK was the largest exporter of plastic waste to Turkey in 2023.

The investigation, called Boy Wasted, revealed that two people are crushed, ripped, or burned to death in the sector every month, and that this has been the case non-stop for the past 10 years.

Mcleary said there was a need for a level playing field for the UK plastic recycling industry. “I don’t like closing plants, it’s jobs and it’s people lives,” he said. “Fundamentally I believe you need to take responsibility for our waste ourselves. It is just common sense as a human being. I don’t want my rubbish to end up in Malaysia. I don’t want to wonder if there is a boy whose life has been wasted somewhere because of me throwing something in a bin outside my house.

“There are lines as a civilised society we should not cross – it is not acceptable.”

A waste worker at a landfill site near Istanbul. The UK is the biggest exporter of plastic waste to Turkey. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA

Mcleary said the loophole that made it cheaper for companies to export plastic rather than keep it in the UK needed to be closed. “We are asking for a level playing field. We don’t want the market tilted towards us. This has been pointed out over a number of years by ourselves and others. Yet today we are in a perfect storm and factories are closing.”

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He welcomed the UK’s plastic packaging tax, which is imposed on producers who fail to include at least 30% of recycled plastic in their products, as a way of driving demand to use our own stock of plastic waste in the UK. But he wants it to be more ambitious by raising the requirement for products to have a minimum recycled content to 50% by 2030 to encourage manufacturers incorporate more of it into their products and reduce the use of virgin plastic.

Building a UK plastic recycling industry to keep the plastic waste thrown out by householders within the country had the potential to become a £2bn industry, hiring 2,000 people directly and 3,000 indirectly and would also restore public confidence in recycling, Mcleary said.

“People in the UK should care where their plastic goes,” he added. “If they think they are recycling they should know it is being recycled, and know that it is being recycled in a responsible fashion.”

Viridor has closed three plastic recycling factories in the past three years; in Avonmouth, Skelmersdale and this year its Rochester sorting plant.

A UK recycling plant sorts plastic waste into bales, ready to be processed. Photograph: Teamjackson/Getty Images

An industry source said it was important that policymakers started seeing waste as critical infrastructure. “If we were to stop exporting plastic waste, and we were to meet our increased recycling target of a 65% recycling rate for municipal waste by 2035, we would need to build 400 new factories across the UK – 20 of them would be sorting facilities and 20 would be processing facilities turning the material back into products,” the source said.

“This is a key growth area and has a carbon benefit because it stops the plastic being incinerated and used in energy for waste. But the risk is now that we are exporting material and the investment and the jobs to other countries.”

The government said it was committed to cleaning up the nation and cracking down on plastic waste. “For too long plastic waste has littered our streets, polluted Britain’s waterways, and threatened our wildlife,” a spokesperson said. “Our packaging reforms will collectively underpin £10bn worth of investment in new sorting and processing facilities, while delivering the deposit return scheme will ensure more plastic is recycled and not chucked away as litter or left to rot in landfill.”