Eradicating plastic begins with your supermarket trolley
The French have given the world a lot: croissants, Dior, Foucault’s pendulum. They are responsible for the hot air balloon, the Etch A Sketch (mais oui), and the second-best slogan in history: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”
I say second-best, because Emmanuel Macron has just topped his nation’s revolutionary cri de coeur during his speech to the US Congress. And in so doing, he may just have helped change the world.
“There is no Planet B.” Say it, shout it, hashtag it. If it’s not trending on Twitter, appearing on mugs and emblazoned across sustainable T-shirts by the end of next month, then I’ll eat my jute shopping bag.
It was deft, catchy, a clever criticism of Trump’s stupid “America first” isolationism and unconscionable withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. When Macron rhetorically asked: “What is the meaning of our life, really, if we work and live destroying the planet while sacrificing the future of our children?” I expect the Donald muttered: “You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.”
Or maybe it was: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.” Either way, he’s not the go-to-guy when it comes to saving the ice caps and protecting marine life.
But here in the UK, we can hold our heads up high with this week’s announcement that every major supermarket in our country has pledged to eradicate unnecessary single-use plastic by 2025 under a new UK Plastics Pact.
I suggest we beg, borrow or steal “There is no Planet B” to publicise this hugely positive step. Needless to say, there will be those complaining it’s too little, but we must all hope and pray it’s not too late.
Yes, it’s a voluntary pledge, without any enforcement mechanism, and I would have preferred something considerably more legislatively binding, but it marks a sea change in social and environmental responsibility that will, I believe, be policed very effectively by public opinion. Some call it the Blue Planet effect; emotive footage of turtles caught up in plastic and whales dying of pollution had a huge impact on viewers.
But this is no flash-in-the-pan reaction; the average person is waking up to the fact that big corporations are destroying our world for the sake of our convenience.
The amount of plastic produced annually is about the same as the entire weight of humanity and, if left unchecked, by 2050 plastic will outweigh the world’s fish stocks.
There are screeds of information on the Telegraph website – April 22 was Earth Day, and the footage of despoiled beaches was particularly shocking – but I genuinely believe we have reached a tipping point.
Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, has previously announced a plan to encourage the recycling of drinks containers through a deposit scheme, and various coffee shops now offer money-off incentives to promote reusable cups.
Nobody’s claiming these baby steps will save the world, but they’re a start. It’s too easy to get caught up in an overwhelming sense of helplessness that begets paralysed inaction.
Along with supermarkets, food and drink manufacturers including Coca-cola, Nestlé and Unilever have vowed to axe some ready-meal trays, crisp packets, polystyrene pizza bases and food pouches.
The frozen-food chain Iceland has already promised to outstrip the rest of the high street by eliminating all plastic packaging from its own-label range by 2023. Morrisons is trialling changes such as allowing customers to bring in their own containers for purchases of fresh meat and fish.
Pepsico, which makes Walkers Crisps, is currently working on alternatives that will be more ecofriendly yet still airtight enough to keep the product fresh.
Again, it sounds piecemeal. Germany has the highest (56 per cent) recycling rate in Europe, followed by Austria and South Korea on 54 per cent, and Wales on 52 per cent. Yes, you heard right. Wales has a recycling rate of 52 per cent, and its ambitious plan to achieve zero waste by 2050 could see it top the leaderboard.
By comparison, Scotland comes 14th and England 18th. And now that China has decreed it will no longer be the world’s “foreign garbage” can and no longer accepts our waste metals, plastic and paper, the onus is on us to do much, much better.
As Wales has shown, where there’s a political will, there’s a way; in October 2011, it became the first nation in the United Kingdom to ban free plastic bags, a practice that has since been adopted elsewhere, and which we now accept as the norm.
I now frown upon plastic drinking straws and have made a mental note not to buy cotton buds with plastic stems. I feel slightly mortified if I forget my reusable shopper and have to pay for a plastic bag; I assume earnest millennials are judging me.
And, you know, they should. There ought to be more of a stigma attached to being Generation Plastic.
That’s the thing about saving the earth – every one of us has a role to play. Every day we make customer decisions and recycling choices that all add up.
So let’s use our consumer clout to support retailers that are combatting waste and taking part in the Plastics Pact and, yes, press them to go further.
We are custodians of mother earth, which we will pass on to our descendants. How will we explain to them the ecological disaster they look set to inherit if we don’t rethink our reliance on plastic?
Remember this: there is no Planet B.