This is Spectator Radio. If you'd like to subscribe to The Spectator, you can get 12 issues for £12

pounds as well as a £20 pound Amazon voucher. Just go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher. Welcome to a special edition of Spectator podcast, looking at what has in recent years become one of the biggest issues in politics, what to do about plastics.

Since its invention, about 100 years ago, plastic has become a facet of our daily lives.

We've been recycling it for years, dutifully taking out the boxes outside our front drive every Wednesday,

but we haven't been recycling very much.

Of the 300 million tons of plastic produced a year, only about 10% is recycled.

And even then it's not so straightforward. Plastic bottles, shampoo bottles,

they're fine to be recycled. But plastic bags and food takeaway containers, plastic cutlery,

it's a rather different story, at least it is right now. But all this is changing. Just as technology

is leaping forward in wind and solar power, advances

are being made in the kind of plastic that can be recycled. So might we end up with plastic

waste one day being seen as an energy source in the same way that fossil fuels are now?

I'm Fraser Nelson and I'm joined by Julie Hill, chair of the Waste and Resource Action Programme,

Michelle Norbin from Sundry, which owns Lucas Agen-Rabina and is therefore a pretty big manufacturer of plastic bottles.

And finally, Kate Gerrity from Dow, one of the world's largest producers of plastic, which is kindly sponsoring this podcast.

So, Kate, I'd like to start

with you. Your company Dow has said that plastic is too valuable a resource to be thrown away or

lost to landfill. Now, that's a funny way of putting it, because you could argue if it's single-use

plastic isn't a resource, it's just something to be chucked into a big hole in the ground somewhere.

Do you think this is going to change?

Yes, I certainly do.

I think in the past we have focused very much on working with our value chain

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