Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026

Companion paper: Building a Company from Trash: The Forma Playbook 2026. All research: Forma Research.

Published 16 October 2026 · George Brown, Forma Designs Collective

What two years of turning retired climbing rope and waste HDPE into products taught one small studio in Aberdeen. Real numbers, the method, and the figures other people can cite.

Summary

Since October 2024, Forma Designs Collective has collected about 8 km of retired climbing rope and close to 100 kg of waste plastic in and around Aberdeen. About 5 km of that rope has been processed, into roughly 3,500 counted belts, bracelets and keychains plus uncounted coasters, cosies, leads, bowls and prototypes. This report sets out what the materials are, where they come from, how we process them by hand, and the numbers we measured along the way. It is written so that other makers, climbing walls, cafes, councils and researchers can use the figures.

Headline numbers (to October 2026)

Five findings

1. Retired rope is a clean, strong, single-material waste stream with no UK take-back route. Our estimate is 50 to 60 tonnes of climbing rope reaching end of life in the UK each year, almost all of it burned or buried.
2. Climbing walls are the supply chain. In Scotland, the 17 roped walls on our list could give roughly a sixth of the rope volume that 10,000 private climbers could, from 0.2% of the contacts.
3. Milk bottle lids are the plastic to go after, not bottles. UK milk bottles are already recycled at about 76%, on the last public figure (2010). Lids are often too small for sorting plants to catch, so they are lost. One cafe throws away up to 3,650 of them a year.
4. Hand-collected, single-type plastic beats industrial recycling on recovery. Because partners sort at source, almost nothing we collect is rejected for contamination.
5. The whole rope can be used. Sections over 20 cm become products, rope that cannot be stripped is coiled into coasters, bowls and mats, and the nylon core is going into filled products. Short offcuts became a product line of their own (earrings).

Why this report exists

Nobody publishes the numbers for small-scale waste-to-product work in the UK. There is no public figure for how many climbing ropes retire each year. There is no post-2010 figure for how many milk bottle lids are recycled. And there is no small-business account of what it takes to collect, process and sell products made from waste. The closest thing is the Precious Plastic impact survey from 2020, which is six years old and global.

We have been doing this work in Aberdeen since October 2024, weighing and logging as we go. This report puts our figures in one place, with the method and the assumptions, so they can be checked and reused.

Who it is for

• Makers and small businesses thinking about working with a waste stream, who need real yields and timings.
• Climbing walls, clubs and outdoor shops that retire rope and want to know what it can become.
• Cafes and food businesses that throw away HDPE every day and want a simple way to stop.
• Councils, funders and researchers who need a cited figure for retired rope or lid waste.
• Journalists who need a number with a source behind it.

How to use it

Every figure is marked as measured (we weighed or counted it), derived (worked out from measured figures and stated assumptions), or external (from a published source, linked in Sources). Please cite the report, not a secondary article, and tell us if you find a better number.

Part 1: Climbing rope

The material

A climbing rope is retired long before it is worn out. It is retired when it can no longer be trusted with a person on the end of it. That is the whole opportunity: a rope that is unsafe for a 5 metre fall is still a strong, clean, single-material nylon cord.

What a rope is made of

A dynamic single rope is 8.9 to 10.5 mm thick and weighs about 60 to 70 g a metre. We use 60 to 65 g for the 10 mm ropes we mostly get. A 60 m personal rope weighs 3.2 to 4.5 kg. Gym ropes are shorter, usually about 35 m, and about 2.3 kg each.

Why rope retires

• A busy indoor wall runs ropes through anchors all day. They rarely last past 6 to 12 months.
• Makers say retire after one year of daily use, three years of weekend use, and ten years no matter what, even unused.
• Any big fall, a core shot, a cut sheath, or chemical contact means instant retirement.
• Ropes are personal protective equipment. Industry and BMC guidance is that retired ropes should be cut up and destroyed rather than passed on for climbing, because handing them on can make you the supplier of unsafe kit. That is why walls bin them.

Why that makes it a good waste stream

1. It is clean. Rope comes in dry, coiled and sorted by its owner.
2. It is one material. There is nothing to separate.
3. It is strong. The product does not have to be designed around a weak input.
4. It has a story. The owner knows where it climbed. That provenance is the product's selling point.
5. It is free. The owner has a disposal problem and we are the solution.

The rope waste problem

Our estimate is that 50 to 60 tonnes of nylon climbing rope reaches end of life in the UK every year, and almost all of it is burned or buried. Nobody measures it. There is no waste code for it, no take-back scheme and no national collection route.

How we built the estimate (derived)

• The BMC counts more than 400 climbing walls in the UK. About 46% are bouldering only, so roughly 200 walls use rope.
• Around 1 million people climb indoors in the UK, including about 100,000 regulars.
• 200 roped walls, each replacing about 40 ropes a year at about 2.3 kg each, is about 8,000 ropes and 19 tonnes.
• Add about 40,000 regular climbers who own a rope and replace it every 3 to 4 years, at 3.2 to 4.5 kg each. That is another 30 to 45 tonnes, and the total lands at 50 to 60 tonnes.
• This leaves out instructors, outdoor centres, universities, the military, rope access training and arborists. The true figure is higher.

Treat it as an order of magnitude. The paid ABC market report, SEPA and Defra waste classifications and real disposal costs per wall would firm it up. We would welcome that work.

What a rope costs the planet to make

A peer-reviewed life cycle study of a Mammut rope found that making a single climbing rope produces about 46.6 kg of CO2 equivalent, and that producing the polyamide 6 is half of that. The same study estimated that recycling all of Switzerland's old ropes would save about 1,170 tonnes of CO2e a year. Ropes are 13% of Mammut's global carbon footprint. Nylon 6 itself carries 3.7 to 6.5 kg CO2e per kg, depending on the producer and the data year.

Why nobody recycles it

• Household recycling centres do not take rope.
• Mixed nylon 6 and nylon 6.6, plus dyes and coatings, ruin an industrial recycling batch.
• Edelrid reports that recycled yarn costs about three times virgin yarn, and that it needed six years of research and two of development to make a rope that is 50% recycled, from pre-consumer offcuts.
• The liability rule above means walls cut ropes up and bin them, which is the right thing to do under PPE guidance and the wrong thing to do with 2.3 kg of nylon.

Who is doing something

The UK has no national scheme. France, Germany and the USA do. That gap is the argument for every climbing wall in the country to have somewhere to send its rope.

Where the rope comes from

Supply is the constraint, not demand. In August 2026 Christmas production used every metre we had and we put out a public call for rope. Everything below is what we built so that it does not happen again.

The routes

The trade

We do not buy rope. We trade for it. A wall or club gives us retired rope and gets Forma products back to sell, gift or fundraise with. Many walls then stock products made from their own rope. The supplier becomes the stockist. Any section over 20 cm is useful, so nothing is refused.

The supply ceiling, Scotland (derived)

Walls give about a sixth of the volume from 0.2% of the contacts. Private climbers are the better story and the better marketing. Walls are the supply chain. A realistic capture of 10% of private ropes plus half the walls would be about 2,250 m a month, which is more than we have ever processed in a month.

What makes a climber donate

The reward is not the barrier. The faff is. Posting a 4 kg coil is a job. So the rules we use are: we cover postage or collect, no minimum, any condition, and the donor sees what their rope became. A photo of the finished product is the thing people share.

What the rope became

About 5 km of the 8 km collected has been processed since October 2024. The rest is in stock, waiting to be sorted, or is damaged sections cut out at the bench.

Products made (Forma production tally, rounded, to October 2026)

The last row is honest about what we do not yet count. When a belt is made, the sheath goes into the belt and the core, the same length again, goes into a bin for filled products. So the 1,100 m of belt rope also yielded about 1,100 m of core, now held for filled products. It is not extra rope in. These are units made, not sold. Well under half have been sold at full price so far. The rest are in stock, on stockists' shelves, traded to rope donors and partners, or were prototypes. A unit-by-unit log with weights, and a sold, stock and traded split, is the next improvement to our method.

Useful conversions (derived)

• A 60 m personal rope is about 20 to 30 belts, or about 240 bracelets, or about 300 keychains.
• A 35 m gym rope is about 12 to 17 belts.
• 1 km of rope weighs about 60 to 65 kg. So 5 km is roughly 300 to 325 kg and 8 km is roughly 500 kg. It is not a tonne, even though 8 km sounds like it should be.
• A coiled coaster 10 cm across uses about 0.8 m of 10 mm rope. A set of four is about 3.2 m.

Design rule that came out of this

Every product is sized to a length of rope that exists. Long clean sections become belts and dog leads. Medium sections become cup cosies and coasters. Short sections become keychains and bracelets. The frayed ends nobody wants became earrings, a product line that exists only because short offcuts had no other use. Rope that cannot be stripped is coiled whole into heat mats and bowls. The aim is that a rope arrives and nothing goes in the bin.

How rope is processed

Most of the work happens before anyone sees a product. The visible part, cutting and sewing, is about a fifth of the time.

The steps

1. Collect, weigh, log. Every rope is weighed and its source recorded. This is what makes the figures in this report possible, and it is what lets a product say which wall it came from.
2. Sort. By condition, length and colour. Damaged sections are cut out: core shots (where the core shows through the sheath), cuts, and glazing (a shiny, heat-hardened patch). Any clean section over 20 cm is kept.
3. Wash and dry. Chalk, dirt and dust come out. Rope that has been sitting in a shed for five years needs this most.
4. Strip. For belts, bracelets and keychains the sheath is pulled off the core. The core is kept.
5. Cut and seal. Lengths are cut for the product and the ends heat-sealed so they do not fray.
6. Sew or coil. Belts and bracelets are sewn on a domestic sewing machine (the first one cost £80). Coasters, mats and bowls are coiled and stitched whole.
7. Fit hardware. Buckles, D-rings, zinc-alloy rings, real carabiners.
8. Stress test. Belts are loaded until something gives. A climbing rope belt that fails is just a worse belt.
9. Package and label. Card sleeve, source wall or donor where known, materials label.

Prototyping

Every product went through 15 to 20 rounds of prototyping before sale, including its packaging. The first belts were made at Robert Gordon University as a design project. The sewing, the buckle fit and the way the two ropes sit together all changed many times.

Yields and losses

• Clean, whole rope: close to 100% by length goes into products or the core bin.
• Rope with damage: the damaged section is lost, usually 0.3 to 2 m per fault.
• Stripping: by length nothing is lost, but the core is not yet a sold product. By weight, the sheath is only about 35 to 40% of the rope. So a belt made from stripped sheath uses about a third of the rope's mass, and the core, about two thirds, waits for filled products.
• Rope that will not strip (stiff, glazed, old): used whole in coiled products, so nothing is lost.

Using the whole rope

Time per product (approximate)

A belt takes 30 to 45 minutes including hardware and finishing. A coiled coaster takes a few minutes to coil and stitch. The slow parts are sorting and washing, which happen in batches, and which no customer ever sees.

Honest carbon accounting for reused rope

We do not claim that reusing a rope "saves" the 46.6 kg of CO2e it took to make. That carbon was spent when the rope was made. What reuse does is keep that spend in use for longer, put off the emissions of burning it, and sometimes replace a new product. Each of those is a different number, so we show all three.

1. Carbon already embodied in the rope we hold (derived)

The gap between the two is the difference between the raw polymer and a finished rope (spinning, braiding, dyeing, coating, transport). The truth for our mixed bag of gym and personal ropes is somewhere between, so we say "several tonnes" and show the working.

2. Emissions deferred by not burning it (derived)

Aberdeen's bin waste goes to the NESS energy from waste plant in East Tullos, a short walk from our studio. Nylon 6 is about 64% carbon by weight, so burning 1 kg releases about 2.3 kg of fossil CO2. Keeping 500 kg of rope out of the incinerator defers roughly 1.2 tonnes of CO2, before crediting the heat the plant would recover and before counting the nitrogen oxides that burning nylon also produces. Deferred, not avoided: the products will be disposed of one day. But the counterfactual is known. In Aberdeen, retired rope gets burned.

3. Emissions avoided by replacing a new product (scenario, not a claim)

If a rope belt replaces a new nylon webbing belt (about 100 g of nylon plus a buckle), the new belt it displaces would have cost roughly 1 kg CO2e. 500 belts would be about 0.5 tonnes. We do not know how many of our belts replaced a purchase rather than adding one, so we do not count this.

What we tell customers

• The rope has already been made and already been used. We are the second use, not a carbon offset.
• Every piece has already been trusted with a life. We used to say "already saved a life", and stopped, because most ropes retire from age, not from catching a fall. The honest line hits just as hard.
• We do not call the products "sustainable". We show where the rope came from and let people decide.

What would make this better

A weighed log of every rope in and every product out, by product, would let us publish kg CO2e per product with a method a researcher could check. That is the metric nobody publishes, and it is the next thing we will build.

Part 2: Waste plastic

The material

We work mainly with HDPE, recycling number 2. It is the plastic in milk bottles, milk and drinks bottle lids and most cleaning product tubs. Milk bottle lids are our bread and butter. HDPE is the easiest plastic for a small studio to work with, and lids are the cleanest way to get it.

The plastics we take and the ones we do not

The rule is one plastic type per batch. Mixing colours of the same plastic gives the marbled pattern. Mixing plastic types gives a weak, delaminating sheet.

Why lids, not bottles

• A separated cap does not pass through a sorting plant. It is too small and light for the screens, so it falls out of the recycling stream. The industry's own advice is "leave caps on", which most people do not do.
• Lids are clean, dry, single-material and already colour-coded by milk type (blue, green, red, gold). A box of lids needs a rinse and nothing else.
• Lids arrive sorted for free. A cafe does not have to do anything except drop them in a tub instead of a bin.
• Bottle caps are about 8% of litter found in UK beach cleans. The problem is visible and people already dislike it.

Why HDPE first, and PP next

HDPE melts low, flows well, and tolerates being reheated. PP needs more heat and a stiffer press but comes in large clean volumes. Some food makers mould their own PP tubs with the label moulded into the tub, so nothing needs separating. That is the kind of single-source, single-material stream the method is built for.

The plastic problem

The UK imports raw HDPE, moulds it into bottles and lids, uses them once, and then burns or buries most of the lids. The bottles are a recycling success story. The lids are not. That is the gap we work in.

The numbers (external, see Sources)

What this means on the ground

• In Aberdeen, say "burned", not "landfilled". The lids a cafe bins today are incinerated at East Tullos, with the heat going into the Torry heat network. That is better than landfill, but it still turns a clean, reusable polymer into CO2 after one use.
• The value we paid for leaves the country. The UK is a large importer of HDPE resin. Every lid burned is imported material bought once and used once.
• Industrial recycling is built for volume and tolerates contamination badly. A dirty or mixed load gets rejected. Hand collection from a known business, sorted at source, has close to zero rejection. Small scale wins on recovery rate even though it loses on tonnage.

The carbon case for recycled HDPE (external)

Virgin HDPE carries about 1.9 kg CO2e per kg of resin (3.3 kg per kg including forming, in the UK government conversion factors). Mechanically recycled HDPE has been measured at 0.24 to 0.28 kg CO2e per kg, an 85 to 88% reduction, though that study was commissioned by a packaging maker, so treat it as the optimistic end. We have not measured our electricity per kg. Small batches in a domestic press can use more energy per kg than a plant, so we publish no figure for our own process until we have measured it.

The cafe model: how much HDPE one cafe throws away

One independent cafe throws away between 365 and 3,650 four-pint milk bottles a year, and the same number of lids. Ten cafes at the busy end is 1.35 tonnes of clean HDPE a year, from milk alone.

Assumptions (measured at our partner cafes, and external)

• Partner cafes get through 1 to 10 four-pint bottles a day. The quiet end is a small cafe. The busy end is a city-centre coffee shop.
• A four-pint HDPE bottle weighs about 35 g. The standard bottle is 40 g and the lightest on the market is 32 g.
• A lid weighs about 2 g. The newest lightweight milk caps are 1.3 g, so 2 g is the cautious end.
• Open 7 days a week. A 6-day cafe is 14% lower.

Per cafe (derived)

What that becomes (derived)

Why cafes say yes

Almost every cafe, climbing wall, office and cleaning company we have asked has said yes. The ask is small: keep a tub behind the counter, drop lids in it, give it a quick rinse. We pick it up every 2 to 3 months on a tracked schedule. In return the cafe gets free coasters made from its own lids, a listing as a Friend of Forma on our website, and a story to tell its customers. One partner joined after seeing another partner's post about us, which is how a supply network grows on its own.

Current plastic partners (October 2026)

Eight businesses in or near Aberdeen have signed up, one still being set up: cafes, a climbing wall and an ice cream maker. All sorted at source.

How plastic is processed by hand today

Everything so far has been made on homemade or second-hand kit: a panini-style heat press, a bookbinding press, an oven and hand tools. A coaster takes 12 to 18 minutes of pressing, cutting and finishing. That is the proof the method works, and the reason it does not yet scale.

The steps

1. Collect. Lids, caps and tubs from partner businesses, every 2 to 3 months, logged per pickup.
2. Sort. By plastic type first (HDPE 2, PP 5, never mixed), then by colour. Milk lids come pre-sorted: blue, green, red, gold.
3. Wash. A rinse in warm water. Lids need almost nothing. Bottles need the label and any milk residue removed.
4. Chop. By hand today, into pieces small enough to melt evenly. This is the slowest step and the one the shredder replaces.
5. Melt. In the heat press between sheets of baking paper or PTFE so the plastic never touches the plates. HDPE softens at about 130 °C and is worked well above that.
6. Pattern. Colours are twisted or layered while soft to give the marbled look. Every piece is a one-off because the colours are whatever came in that week. We sell that as the point, not a flaw.
7. Cool under pressure. The hot sheet goes into a bookbinding press between 10 mm aluminium caul plates (flat plates that spread the pressure evenly). HDPE warps badly as it cools, so it must cool fully under load. Thin plates bow and give a thick centre and thin edges.
8. Cut. To shape. A coaster is about 5 mm thick, which feels solid and presses flat without wasting plastic. Laser cutting HDPE is possible but slow and smelly, so flat products are cut mechanically. CNC is the planned route.
9. Back, label, pack. A cork disc glued to the base. Materials label. Card sleeve.

Mould notes (from our own testing)

• Aluminium beats mild steel for HDPE moulds. It heats faster and more evenly and cools faster, so the cycle is shorter. Steel is half the price per metre and tougher, but gets hot and cold spots that cause permanent warp.
• Whatever the metal, go 10 mm or thicker. Thin plates dish under pressure.
• Vent holes or gaps let trapped air out. Without them you get bubbles and voids.
• Nothing bonds well to HDPE. Our awards trophy design uses screws and dowels through the HDPE sheet, not glue.

Safety

Ventilate. HDPE and PP give off fumes when overheated. Never heat or laser PVC. A fume extractor is in the equipment list for that reason. Some cheap sports balls are PVC, so every new material gets a check before it goes near heat or a laser.

What has been collected so far, and what the machines change

Close to 100 kg of waste plastic (bottles, tubs and lids; the split by type is not yet logged) has been collected from partner businesses in 2026, and the first HDPE coasters went on sale in July 2026. By hand, one cafe's lids are a few weekends of work. With a shredder and an injection machine, one cafe's year of bottles is a few hours of shredding and a few days of moulding.

Collected and made (measured and tallied)

What the machines change

The material is free. Once the kit is in place, the time per product drops from minutes of hand work to a batch run. For comparison, the Precious Plastic impact survey (2020) found an average workspace processes about 835 kg a year and earns about €7,279, with only one in ten profitable. Our target is to pass both figures on plastic alone within a year of the machines arriving, and to publish whether we did.

Part 3: Packaging

Our packaging is one flat sheet of Kraft card, laser cut, laser engraved, folded round the product and glued. There is no ink, no paint, no laminate and no plastic coating on the card. We make it ourselves on a 10 W desktop laser in the studio.

Why engrave instead of print

• Printed packaging usually carries inks, varnishes or a plastic film. All of them make card harder to recycle and some of them stop it composting.
• Laser engraving burns the logo and the text into the card. The card stays card. The scrap goes in the card recycling or to a neighbour who wants it.
• Making it in-house means a new product gets new packaging the same afternoon, and no supplier holds our cash.

The laser settings we use (xTool S1, 10 W diode, Kraft card)

The curved-fold maths

A single crease gives a sharp edge that cracks and looks cheap. We use a band of score lines about 1 mm apart, so the card bends into a smooth curve round the edge of the product. The band has to be half the circumference of the product's edge:

Score band width = π × product depth ÷ 2

So a 5 mm thick product needs a 7.85 mm band, which we draw as 8 lines. Panel width is the product width plus a little ease. The glue tab is about 10 mm. A hang hole is only added if the packaging hangs on a peg.

Nothing wasted on the sheet

The gaps between sleeves on every laser sheet are filled with small cards we need anyway: a QR card that joins the newsletter and gives £7 credit, 38.4 mm square on the bracelet sheet. They cost nothing because the sheet is already being cut. Laser-cut Kraft business cards for local businesses use the same idea: 48 cards a sheet, about 23 cards an hour, no inks or films.

What is on the pack

Front: logo, product name, "Made from retired climbing rope.", "Aberdeen, Scotland". Back: care (wipe clean, do not machine wash, keep metal dry), materials (retired climbing rope, polyamide 100%, batch letter, zinc-alloy ring), producer address and website.

What we do not say

We never call the packaging "plastic-free". Orders go out in a mailing bag, and the honest line is that the card itself carries nothing but card. Claims that cannot be checked are the thing this whole report is against.

Reference figures

These are the figures we expect people to quote. Each one says where it came from. Cite as: Forma Designs Collective, The Forma Material Report 2026, Aberdeen, October 2026.

Method, data sources and limits

This is a working report from a one-person studio, not a laboratory study. The figures are good enough to plan with and honest about where they are soft.

Where our figures come from

• Rope in: weighed and logged at the bench since October 2024. Individual donors logged in a donor tracker since July 2026 with rope type, count, metres and how it arrived.
• Products made: Forma's own production tally, rounded to the nearest hundred.
• Plastic in: partner pickups logged in a partner tracker with dates and weights.
• Cafe bottle counts: asked directly of partner cafes. The range covers the quietest and busiest.
• Times: measured on the bench.
• Everything marked external is from a published source listed under Sources, opened and read, not a search snippet.

Assumptions used in derived figures

Limits

1. The 8 km and 5 km rope figures are running tallies, not a unit-by-unit log. A weighed log per rope and per product is the next improvement.
2. The product counts (500 belts, 1,000 bracelets, 2,000 keychains) are rounded and include stock made and not yet sold, products traded to rope donors, and prototypes.
3. The UK rope waste estimate of 50 to 60 tonnes is an order of magnitude built from published wall counts and retirement rates. It has not been checked against disposal records.
4. The cafe range of 1 to 10 bottles a day is from a small number of Aberdeen cafes. Chains and large coffee shops will be higher.
5. We have not measured our own electricity use per kg of plastic or per product, so we publish no carbon figure for our own process.
6. Prices are October 2026 and will change. We have not logged how many businesses we asked to save their waste, so "near 100%" means every business approached in 2026 said yes, not a measured rate.

How to cite this report

Forma Designs Collective (2026). Retired Rope and Waste Plastic: The Forma Material Report 2026. Aberdeen, Scotland. Version 1.0, 16 October 2026. Available from formadesignscollective.com/pages/rope-and-plastic-report-2026.

You may reuse the figures and tables with that credit. We will update this report each year with the new totals, and keep the old versions available so a figure cited in 2026 can still be found in 2028. Corrections and better data are welcome at george@formadesignscollective.com.

Sources

Forma data (internal)

• Forma rope log and production tally, October 2024 to October 2026
• Forma rope donor tracker, from July 2026
• Forma recycling partners tracker, from mid 2026
• Forma brand and packaging rules (laser settings, packaging maths), 2026

Climbing rope

• Bradford, Rupf and Stucki (2021). Life cycle assessment of a climbing rope. Sustainability 13(2):707. ZHAW digital collection and MDPI
• Suston Magazine (2021). Recycling ropes, reducing CO2 (Mammut Close the Loop, ropes as 13% of Mammut's footprint)
• Lacrux (2021). Close the Loop: 758 kg of ropes collected
• Lacrux (2021). Edelrid NEO 3R, a rope made from ropes
• Association of British Climbing Walls (2025). Indoor climbing market research
• BMC. Money for Old Rope
• Scavenger. Climbing gear collection points

Nylon and HDPE carbon factors

• PlasticsEurope eco-profile, polyamide 6, via Climatiq
• LANXESS (2022). Certified carbon footprint for polyamide 6
• BAFA (2025). Virgin HDPE, via Climatiq
• UK government conversion factors, HDPE including forming, via Climatiq
• c7-consult for Alpla. Recycled HDPE reduces CO2 emissions (industry funded)

Plastic recycling and waste

• Geyer, Jambeck and Law (2017). Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances 3(7). DOI 10.1126/sciadv.1700782
• Argus Media (2025). UK plastic packaging recycling down in 2024
• RECOUP (2026). Household plastic packaging survey, 2024 data summary
• Packaging Insights. HDPE milk bottle recycling rate reaches 76% (RECOUP, 2010 data)
• Resource (2023). Solutions: recycling plastic bottle caps
• Müller. Lightweight milk caps
• Farming UK (2013). Nampak creates lightest four-pint milk bottle
• Statista. UK HDPE import value
• SEPA (2025). Scottish household waste statistics, 2024
• Resource (2024). Household waste in Scotland, 2023, by council
• Aberdeenshire Council (2023). NESS energy from waste facility begins full operation

Comparable makers

• Precious Plastic. Impact survey (2020)
• Design Milk. Weez and Merl

Companion paper: Building a Company from Trash: The Forma Playbook 2026. All research: Forma Research.