Plastic menace:
Blue Planet II inspires new drive to eliminate tons of disposable waste that pours into the world’s oceans
THERESA MAY is facing mounting pressure to introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme after Britain’s biggest supermarket said it would support one.
The Prime Minister yesterday launched a 25-year environment strategy, which included a pledge to eliminate “avoidable” plastic waste, such as coffee cups and drinks bottles.
However, MPS and environmental campaigners said the strategy lacked sufficient concrete measures to significantly reduce plastic waste and called on the Government to urgently introduce a deposit and refund scheme for plastic bottles after Tesco said it was willing to support one.
The Government, however, has only committed to a review. While conceding that deposit schemes had worked in the past, Mrs May said: “We’re looking at what is the best way – is it by encouraging people to recycle more, or is it to reuse plastic? We want to look at the evidence of what will work.
“I’m old enough to remember when in my youth Corona bottles, that was glass, you took it back and you got your sixpence. So this is not the first time a scheme such as this has been used.”
Environment campaigners have called for a scheme under which people would pay a deposit on top of the price of a plastic bottle, to be refunded upon its return.
The Prime Minister suggested that employers should ban plastic cups, knives and forks from the workplace, following the example set in Whitehall. In a speech at the London Wetland Centre, she said: “We will drive down the amount of plastic in circulation by reducing demand. Government will lead the way … I want to see other large organisations doing the same.”
The Prime Minister pledged “action at every stage of the production and consumption of plastic”.
Next month, the Government will call for evidence on how taxes or charges might discourage the use of products such as takeaway containers.
Asked about what she personally had done to improve the environment, Mrs May said she and Philip, her hus- band, were proud to have bird and bat boxes in their garden and she urged the whole country to do its “little bit”.
She said that her new focus on eliminating disposable plastic waste came after watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II series on television, adding: “We must reduce the demand for plastic, the number of plastics in circulation and improve recycling rates.”
Not everyone was enamoured by her speech. Chris Tuckett, head of the Marine Conservation Society, said: “We are disappointed by the lack of commitment to take action now.
“We urgently need to stop the tide of plastic entering our oceans. An aspiration to eliminate ‘avoidable’ plastic waste by 2042 is just not sufficient.”
Mary Creagh, Labour MP and head of the Environmental Audit Committee, said: “The plan fails to provide any legal basis for its ambitions for the environment, which will be needed after we lose EU legal environmental protections after Brexit. My committee has called for a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles and for disposable coffee cups to be made recyclable by 2023.”
Supermarkets charge extra for loose fruit and vegetables, which encourages more plastic waste, according to a consumer website which named Morrisons and Sainsbury as particular offenders.
Afew weeks ago, groups of Conservative MPS were summoned into 10 Downing Street to be given a short seminar on how awful everything is. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff, presented research on which values are associated with which parties and the results were pretty disastrous. The Tories were associated with the clichés – security, the economy – but not with jobs, their biggest single success. On inequality, education and health Labour was ahead; among the young, streets ahead. But the environment, as an agenda, was up for grabs. No party, yet, is associated with that.
The Prime Minister’s 25-year plan on the environment, revealed yesterday, is an attempt to plant a Tory flag on this territory. A noble aim: conservatism and environmentalism are inextricably linked. But there wasn’t too much of substance, which isn’t so surprising given that the value of any government scheme tends to be inversely proportional to the time allocated to its completion. We do, however, have one solid policy. Soon, all shops are to be banned from giving away plastic carrier bags and afterwards, Philip Hammond might tax other “singleuse” packaging. Plastic, it seems, is the new national enemy.
The war against plastic bags has been waged for some time now, here and overseas. They’re fairly easy to hate, especially when seen littering streets and beaches, and neatly symbolise a throwaway culture. They’re also easy to stop: the 5p charge, when applied to supermarkets, saw a collapse in the number issued. Shoppers soon adjusted, and got into the habit of bringing their own bags. Totes are now popular, especially among companies who put their name on them and turn people into walking adverts. Why, we ask, be seen carrying anything else?
Mrs May is now ready for the next stage. She is seeking to build a hierarchy of enemy plastics, with a view to taxing the worst. She would like to eliminate all “avoidable” plastic waste – albeit by 2042 – and has suggested that some supermarket aisles should be made plastic-free. The stocking of shelves in Tesco is not, yet, a concern of government but the Prime Minister senses a new opportunity. Or, rather Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, does. He was behind David Cameron’s hug-ahusky phase 13 years ago and again sees a chance to align the Tories behind a popular cause. Then, it was global warming; now, it is a crusade against plastic.
Since Labour and the Liberal Democrats are also on the same side, we have agreement – and, ergo, danger. As Nigel Lawson once pointed out, large errors normally follow a cross-party consensus because no one questions or scrutinises the arguments. In this case, no one is asking why plastic has gone from being a wonder material – a cheap and durable replacement for metal, leather, glass, ceramics and more – to being denounced as a modern-day menace, a threat to coastlines, sea life and the planet. Almost no one in Parliament, it seems, has a word to say in defence of it.
Look more closely and it’s hard to see how the country, let alone the planet, has been helped much by the plastic bag charge. Even before the 5p tariff, they barely made the top 10 litter offenders in the list drawn up by Keep Britain Tidy. Cigarette butts, sweet wrappings, fast-food containers, drinks bottles and car parts: they’re the real scourge. Plastic bags make up about 0.2 per cent of household waste; and bear in mind that almost half of the old plastic bags were themselves used as bin liners. If people are now buying more bespoke bin liners, instead of free plastic bags, is that such a win for the environment? My local supermarket now doesn’t even sell normal bags, charging 15p for thicker ones. This leaves me with higherquality bin liners, but I’m not sure the planet is much better off.
And that lovely cotton tote bag? The “bag for life”? You’d have to use it about 175 times to make it better for the planet than 175 throwaway plastic bags. It takes a lot of soil, water and pesticides to grow cotton. The efficiencies of modern chemistry mean that almost nothing is wasted making a plastic. Philippe Starck, the French designer, once summed it up well. “The more you use plastic in an intelligent and ethical way,” he said, “the less often you kill animals to have the leather, the less often you kill trees to have wood.”
This is the point that politicians seldom examine: yes, plastic has its headaches. But if not plastic, then what? The glass Irn Bru bottles that Mr Gove and I grew up with in northeast Scotland, which schoolboys would liberate from bins to exchange for cash, have now been replaced by plastic ones. But is this such a regressive step? Glass bottles are heavy, needing more energy to create and transport. They’re more liable to break and so waste. Household waste can be recycled, and we can do so more than we’re doing now. The plateauing of German recycling rates suggests there’s a limit to how much waste any society can realistically recycle. Britain, at 44 per cent, might not be far from that limit.
When Mr Hammond collects evidence on whether to tax single-use plastic, he ought to bear M Starck’s point in mind. What are the alternatives to plastic, and what are their wider environmental implications? Failure to think clearly about all this can lead to embarrassing U-turns down the road. Not so long ago the government was encouraging us to buy diesel cars, saying they had a smaller carbon footprint and used less fuel. Now, they’re being hit with special penalty taxes because of the nitrogen oxides they emit. This is the problem with having environmental policy decided by fashionable arguments: fashions change.
Mr Gove says he has been profoundly moved by watching the BBC’S Blue Planet and its evidence of plastic polluting the oceans. Perhaps so, but nothing that was announced yesterday will be of much help. It’s still clever politics, though: the party needs a new cause, other than Brexit – a means to show that they care. What we heard yesterday was really a 25-year plan to save the Tories. The planet, for now, can wait.