Retailers take up the fight

Retailers in South Africa have begun to respond to concerns over single-use plastics. Woolworths wants all its brand plastic packaging to be reusable or recyclable by 2022, and is phasing out all single-use plastic shopping bags by 2020. The company has introduced paper-stemmed earbuds and stopped selling plastic straws or offering plastic straws and cutlery at its Wcafes and Now Now kiosks.

Pick n Pay announced last week that it would give customers who spent R50 or more a free reusable bag made from recycled plastic. This follows the introduction of its fully recyclable blue carrier bags made from 60% post-consumer waste and 40% factory waste.

But retailers say replacing the plastic packaging used to extend the shelf life of fresh foods with an environmentally friendly alternative is difficult. Woolworths said the plastic wrapper around a cucumber reduces the cucumber’s respiration rate, ensuring its shelf life is three times longer and that red meat packed in paper would lose moisture quickly without an adequate oxygen barrier. — Lynley Donnelly compared with three cents for plastic straws.

But it is critical that consumers “come to the party”, Jhetam said. “There is still a lot of apathy among consumers in terms of good environmental practice and recycling … We are a throw-away society.”

Consumers also set the standard for what the industry — manufacturers, retailers and brand owners — produces, including what they are willing to pay for alternatives. “Are we prepared to pay a few cents more?” he asked, especially since South Africa is not a wealthy country.

The packaging industry, which includes producers of glass, metals, plastics and paper products, has submitted an extended producer responsibility plan (EPR) — an industry waste management plan which proposes that the responsibility for a product extends beyond the post-consumer stage of its life-cycle. The EPR, which is awaiting approval from the department of environmental affairs, proposes that efforts to manage the country’s waste streams be led by industry.

Under the EPR plan, industry is targeting paper and packaging recycling and collection levels of 66.9% by 2023. Jhetam points out that this is even better than targets that the European Union has set for itself.

Struggling to separate

A key feature of the plan is to move towards separation at source, especially at municipal and city level. “We need mandatory separation at source in South Africa,” said Jhetam. But the department of environmental affairs told Parliament that municipalities do not have the resources to recycle correctly, according to minutes from the Parliamentary Monitoring Group.

De Kock said the difficulties with separation at source begin with the fact that fewer than 50% of households have proper waste collection. Many municipalities do not function properly, which leads to illegal dumping, and they do not have properly managed and engineered landfills. The use of plastics in packaging has exploded in recent years, she noted, and the country’s waste management systems have been unable to keep up.

Another contributing factor is that packaging being produced by retailers, brand owners and manufacturers is not designed for recycling.

A tax on single-use plastics could discourage the production of problematic plastics, she said, but more detail is needed on how it would work. For example, will the tax apply to only virgin material — plastic that comes directly from petrochemical by-products and has never been used or recycled? How a “single-use plastic” is defined is also important, she said. For instance, would a plastic label on a spice bottle be defined as single-use?

De Kock said the emphasis should be to get all plastics into a circular economy model. This means plastic products are designed for easy collection, separation and recycling.

“If it can’t be recycled, it must be eliminated,” she said.

Bioplastics not all biofriendly

There has been a spike in bioplastics that purport to be made of environmentally friendly material that decompose.

But De Kock and industry bodies warned against the claims of many of these unregulated products which, for instance, only biodegrade under very specific conditions and need the likes of industrial composting equipment to break down.

Often consumers are not told about how to dispose of these products properly, she said, and they can contaminate the waste streams that go into recyclable plastics, destroying whole batches of recycled material.

Fixing the waste recycling system is enormously complex and there is no easy solution, said De Kock. “It is a whole system that you have to change.”