Two decades ago, Germany set up a simple scheme to reduce plastic waste. When people buy drinks in a disposable plastic bottle, they pay a small extra fee and get that back by depositing the used bottle at a return centre. Many other countries have similar incentives. But has the intervention actually cut Germany’s use of single-use plastics? There’s little evidence for that, says Antaya March, a researcher at the Global Plastics Policy Centre, which was set up in 2022 at the University of Portsmouth, UK, to conduct independent assessments of plastic-waste management around the world. … Of the 8.7 billion tonnes of plastic waste produced between 1950 and 2021, only 11% has ever gone through recycling, according to unpublished estimates by Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (see ‘A tide of plastic waste’).