Introduction

About half the plastic that's produced in the world, about 400 million tonnes every year, is used just once and then thrown away. An estimated 5 billion old mobile phones were discarded or stashed away in drawers and cupboards last year. The World Bank forecasts a huge increase in demand for many materials that those phones are made of - like copper, cobalt and lithium. So why aren't we recycling all of this precious material? Rates of household waste recycling have stagnated and even dropped in recent years. And what can be done to get more out of this so-called waste material and get it back into use? Three leading experts who are fixated on this very issue join me