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Next time you see a teenager defiantly dropping his chip poke or whatever litter on the pavement in full view of all, you might temper the insults in your head and lower your blood pressure by thinking of all the unnecessary so-called single-use plastic packaging you have bought in the last week.
Besides being a waste of resources, single-use plastic packaging is becoming a serious environmental issue. Vortices of flakes of plastic pollution hundreds of miles across can be found in the Pacific and the Atlantic and plastic can be found washed up on shores everywhere on the planet. Plastic is consumed by marine life of all sizes from whales to jellyfish.
Plastic cannot be recycled as glass or aluminium can – recycled aluminium can be made as perfect and pure as any made from raw bauxite. It can be recycled indefinitely. There are more than six types of plastic in common use in household packaging and because they become mixed in the recycling process they contaminate each other. It might be better to say that plastic can be unicycled and when it is used for the second time to make drain pipes or car parts that’s it. Next time around it goes to landfill or into the sea.
The recycling process itself is a chemically dirty and poorly paid labour intensive business. This is not to say plastic recycling isn’t worth it – that extra life is worth it but really it would be much better if the plastic had never been made (or bought) in the first place. Buying hand-soap in a plastic pump dispenser is the middle-class equivalent of dropping litter onto the street and it should be viewed as an equally careless and ignorant act.
I emailed ‘Just Ask’ at Edinburgh City Council to just ask if my plastic waste went to China. Rather than just answer they referred me to the council website – Eco-Plastics in Lincolnshire turns out to be the destination and on their website they are proud to display their ‘CHINESE AQSIQ CERTIFICATE’ (all capitals) which ‘allows you to sell scrap materials to China direct!’. I did elicit a more detailed response from ‘Waste Services’ – who expressed confidence that Edinburgh’s plastic went no further than Lincoln, a confidence that melted a little when I pointed this certificate out to them.
Milk cartons constitute the bulk of the plastic in my ‘Edenburgh’ recycling box. It really is a disgrace that a product purchased by most people daily should be distributed in plastic especially when it was once distributed in reusable glass bottles and later in degradable cardboard cartons. The cartons were tricky to break into – who can forget the breakfast reminder of one’s fallibility revealed too late – ‘Open other side’ and it was probably the inconvenience of opening or perhaps also the inconvenience of cleaning up spilt milk in the supermarket that led to the cartons’ demise. But is inconvenience sufficient excuse to distribute milk in plastic? I don’t think so. The cardboard milk carton is alive and kicking in other countries – why not here? Plastic milk cartons should be the first disposable thing to be taxed by any Scottish Government if they really give a monkey’s about the environment.
In an age when we are constantly reminded of the harm a product might do to our bodies – the fat content, the alcohol, the salt – I would like to see more reminders of the harm a product might do to the environment. On all plastic bottles I would like to see reminder labels like ‘This product is available in a cardboard box’ or ‘It’s better for the environment to buy this sauce in a glass bottle’.
I’m not much of an environmental activist. I was – about 10 years ago – an active Greenpeace volunteer. In my few years with them they ran the Frankenstein Food campaign against GM crops. A leading campaigner turned out to be an organic farmer from Sutherland – he got himself arrested with Lord Peter Melchett ripping up a GM crop. Organic vegetables did well in the supermarket that year.
In the same period Greenpeace raided a ship carrying a consignment of Amazon timber causing the buyers – B&Q I seem to remember and other well-known DIYers – to pull out. Some one, however, did buy the timber but when I asked one of those Greenpeace activists involved in the stunt who got their hands on this huge now bargain basement consignment of hardwood he claimed he did not know. Activists broke into the yard and spray-painted some of it, he told me and I quote: (roughly – it was a while ago) ‘We followed a truck load to Edinburgh in fact but lost sight of it there’. I had an uncomfortable feeling that if I had been from Tipperary the answer would have been that they had followed a truck load there too.
When it became apparent that the Greenpeace solar kitchen set up in Holyrood Park during the festival was mostly powered by the truck that towed it around the country I thought it just one more forgivable white lie. I was a believer. I still am – kind of. I still pay my annual supporters’ fee – not membership fee for, aside from paid staff, you cannot as far as I know become a member of Greenpeace. Unlike say Amnesty International where members are members and have the right to vote on resolutions regarding the running of the organisation, Greenpeace ‘supporters’ have no such rights. The mechanism by which Greenpeace decides to campaign or not campaign for this or that is quite obscure and for some reason Greenpeace has never had all that much to say about the growing gratuitous use of polluting plastic packaging.
For this reason I am starting my own one-man boycott. Next time I buy soap it will be a solid bar wrapped in paper not a plastic bottle with a pump on top. When I am baffled by the choice of detergent for the washing machine I will simplify my decision by considering only those ones in a cardboard box. I will go to the butcher in the high street – while we still have one – to get away from the plastic supermarket meat trays.
Just today I have succeeded in getting milk delivered to my door in a glass bottle – though sadly the modern bottle turns out to have a sturdy plastic top. I’m not asking anyone to join me but I hope the next time you find yourself scowling in horror as you watch a piece of crap fly out the window of the car in front you at least consider it.
The Scottish Government is consulting on having a 5p tax on poly bags – I hope it does and I hope that it’s just the start of it.
John McGrath taught physics and maths for 20 years. In 2004 he set up Chalk and Talk e-learning support – an independent consultancy supporting online education and training projects.
