The Big Plastic Count
Photography and videography
Documentation for The Big Plastic Count, the UK’s biggest people-powered investigation into plastic waste with the mission to drive meaningful policy change.
Bringing the plastic conversation to Parliament
Led by Everyday Plastic, The Big Plastic Count commissioned me to follow their advisory groups in 2026 at events across England and Wales, culminating in a presentation of their findings to MPs at Westminster.
In March 2026, 68,000 people from schools, homes, workplaces and community groups spent a week counting every piece of plastic waste they produced. 1.5 million pieces logged. Scaled across all UK households, that suggests around 82 billion pieces of plastic packaging entering the waste stream every single year. The majority came from food and drink packaging. The single biggest source? Fruit and vegetables. The very things that often don’t need packaging at all.
What feels most striking is the gap between what we know and what’s being done. Recycling can’t keep up. So the waste goes one of two places - into incinerators, or exported to poorer countries as a form of waste colonialism and it’s happening insidiously.
The asks from the campaign to the UK government are: ditch plastic packaging on uncut fruit and veg by 2030, stop building new incinerators, and end plastic waste exports. It’s a story that needs to be seen - not to disempower our efforts of recycling, but to demand systemic change simultaneously.
Empowering communities
I had the privilege of being in spaces with so many passionate community members, documenting advisory groups brought together by The Big Plastic Count in Birmingham, Cardiff and Tower Hamlets as part of London Climate Action Week 2026. This culminated with presentations of the group’s findings to MPs at Westminster.
Through photography and videography, I provided documentary-style coverage for of the events, group headshots and team portraits, as well as key interview and b-roll footage for their first The Big Plastic Count advisory group programme and results documentation. These evergreen assets have since been used across their marketing channels to help elevate the story of the movement.
We can feel so overwhelmed by the enormity of the environmental crisis and what our individual impact can be, but these spaces really show strength of community-driven activism and the power of lived experiences to help inform policy change.
