I’m no Scrooge, but the packaging and boxes just have to go

As we gear up for next week’s festivities, city councillor Nick-eden Green has urged authorities to go further than just ditching single-use plastic...

Don’t let’s have another rubbish Christmas

Don’t get me wrong. This is not about playing Mr Scrooge or failing to enter into into the Christmas spirit. But one of the things we all have to deal with in the days after Christmas is trying to stuff all the extra waste into the right bins once the celebrations are over.

It’s really all about trying to avoid the waste in the first place.

After lengthy and overdue delays, the government finally introduced a very modest charge for plastic shopping bags and put an end to them being doled out for free. That has cut plastic bag use by over 90%. Now the government is sitting on the fence about introducing a deposit scheme on one-trip drinks containers. Meanwhile, the more responsible of us are using tap water in our own containers rather than wasting money on little bottles.

I’m suggesting we could go a lot further. Not just at Christmas but all year round. Actually, for ever and ever.

Let’s have a deposit scheme for all drinks containers. Let’s have it now. Glass, plastic, water, wine. The whole lot. Beer and pop bottles had deposits when I was a kid. Have we really advanced so far? Take the empties back to any supermarket, shop or café selling such items and get the refund. Do the same for onetrip coffee or tea containers and plastic drinking straws, too.

Why stop at plastic? This may be the most pernicious and long-lasting pollutant in our oceans which, even after years, doesn’t completely break down. So much so that we now inadvertently consume it each time we have a fish supper. But we can avoid so much more unnecessary waste.

Look at all the other packaging manufacturers use. Why does toothpaste come in a tube and then in a box which we have to throw away in order to use the toothpaste? Get rid of the box. Do the same for shampoo bottles in a box, many cosmetics, perfumes, hair dyes, cough mixture, indeed, half the chemists shop. Why do some biscuits come in a cellophane wrapper and then in a box, or pizzas or muesli or dry pet food? Stop manufacturing the boxes. What happened to the brown paper bag for fruit and vegetables? Have we really advanced our thinking when we are encouraged to eat more of our five a day yet we have to buy them in a plastic tray with a plastic film cover, none of which is necessarily recyclable? And don’t forget that recycling itself costs money and energy. So why can’t we avoid this unnecessary packaging in the first place?

Don’t even get me going on boxes of chocolates. I’ll swear a box of After Eights has more packaging than peppermints.

And if you get given some bit of fancy electrical kit I bet it will come wrapped in a nondisposable plastic bag and then in a box. Why the bag? Indeed, in some cases, why the box as well?

Surely what we need is a grown-up conversation between the government that legislates, the manufacturers who produce the waste, the shops and supermarkets who sell it and the local authorities who have to dispose of it. Why not lock a few of them up in a room together over Christmas until they come up with a solution? Admittedly, not something you would normally expect a Liberal Democrat to suggest. But I bet they’d be begging to be let out with some answers by Boxing Day.