The Herald - The Herald Magazine
SEA CHANGE
MANAGING DIRECTOR OF A LEADING PLASTICS FIRM JOINS BEACH CLEAN-UP VOLUNTEERS AS SCOTLAND TACKLES POLLUTION CRISIS
A plastics firm boss joins beach clean-up volunteers as Scotland tackles a pollution crisis
THE tidal pool looks perfect. The rock is reddish-brown; plant life seems to glow in the sunshine through glass-clear water. Approaching it, tiny marine animals dart away, seeking cover beneath stones. It’s a hot day and I wade in to cast my eye over the bottom of the pool. There. And there. Sharp blue; vermilion; unnaturally black: you can see them clearly when you get close up.
A centimetre or two across at most, they are scraps of plastic, small but unmistakable among the soft forms and colours of the pool’s inhabitants. I add them to my bag of rubbish scavenged from the pools here at Killiedraughts Bay, on the north side of Eyemouth in Berwickshire.
We’re on a beach clean organised by Sarah Russell, project officer for the St Abbs and Eyemouth Voluntary Marine Reserve, dedicated to keeping these waters and coastline pollution-free.
We work our way in from the low-water line to the top of the beach, which is rocky below the sweep of sand surrounded by grassy cliffs that makes it such an attractive spot.
There are two bike frames and the metal skeleton of a pushchair, but the rest of the rubbish we find is plastic and neoprene, scraps such as those in the pool, bigger bits that seem to be car components, fishing line, diving goggles, old balloons and then broken buckets, lengths of cord and twine and car tyres.
The biggest object is a piece of polypropylene rope. Probably from a ship, several metres long and thick as a rugby forward’s thigh, it takes three of us to prise it from the sand and drag it up the beach to our stack of remnants.
It is satisfying to remove the big stuff. After a few hours in the August sun we pose with our haul, oddly pleased that we have found so much rubbish: though the best outcome to a beach clean would be to find nothing.
But what’s worrying is those little shards. They are evidence of how plastic is broken down by the sea, small scraps ground smaller until almost invisible, then washed into the water. It’s inert matter that can be swallowed but not digested by fish, plankton or bacteria: the crux of the plastic problem.
“The rocky shore makes it especially bad,” Russell says. “Because of the exposure to the waves, plastics get broken up much quicker as they get thrashed around on the rocks.
“To actually clean a beach like Killiedraughts completely is nigh-on impossible. You can see all the big bottles and stuff, that’s obvious. But when you get down into it there are fragments of plastic everywhere.”
Like a lot of people, I’m worried about plastic and the beach clean doesn’t calm my fears. Newspaper reports tell me the “global plastic binge” will surge over the next 10 years after investments in new US plastics plants, and that a Chinese ban on importing much plastic waste means a build-up of rubbish at UK recycling plants.
Prime Minister Theresa May pledges to eradicate all “avoidable” plastic waste by
2042 and David Attenborough’s acclaimed Blue Planet II series tells how microparticles of plastic absorb industrial pollutants and put them into the food chain.
Ullapool declares itself a no-plastic-straw zone. The Herald quotes a Marine Conservation Society (MCS) report saying Scots beaches are “pollution hotspots for plastic cotton bud sticks” and the Scottish Government says it will ban their sale.
Plastic is the latest thing we love to hate: but are we right to demonise it?
For Catherine Gemmell, the answer has got to be yes. The Scotland conservation officer for the MCS pops up on radio, TV and especially social media with almost alarming regularity as one of the public faces of the campaign to stop plastic getting into the sea.
She’s a one-woman whirlwind of soundbites, humour and action, promoting the idea that we can all help. A veteran of hundreds of beach cleans, she promotes Beach Watch, a “citizen science” project getting people to adopt 100 metres of beach, clean it and log the litter. The data helps MCS and others decide what campaigns to run. I see her in action at a clean and survey at Cramond beach near Edinburgh, organising volunteers and weighing the dozens of sacks of refuse collected.
THE group of six that I join finds more than 300 wetwipes buried in the tideline. They are durable because they contain plastic fibres and come from sewage overflows. Gemmell explains that tidal currents sort the litter, with Cramond getting wipes and plastic bottles gathering across the River Almond at Dalmeny. On the north shore of the Forth there are clusters of nurdles, tiny plastic pellets which are manufacturing’s raw material.
“Most of it comes from land and the majority from the public – it’s litter dropped at the beach or dropped inland, gone through waterways or drains, through toilets and into the ocean,” Gemmell says. “It’s caused by people’s behaviour.”
Survey finds of wetwipes at Cramond have helped fuel a campaign against them. It’s how Gemmell and other environmental campaigners work, to focus on a particular issue, battering away at MPs and MSPs to get a small victory.
The Scottish plastic carrier-bag charge brought a 40 per cent fall in plastic bags on beaches, which also led to Scotland’s plans for a plastic bottle deposit-return system; pictures of bundles of cotton bud stalks found on beaches prompted the pledge to ban them. The latest Stop the Plastic Tide appeal is looking to get a levy imposed on single-use “on the go” plastic items.
Gemmell is adamant: plastic is a problem. “Unfortunately in our throwaway society plastic has been this convenient product but now we are using it for things we really don’t need it for. It has its uses but we don’t need single-use water bottles, plastic cotton bud sticks. We need to raise awareness that we don’t need so much plastic.”
Kevin Ross, on the other hand, believes passionately in plastic. He’s president of the Scottish Rubber and Plastics Association, representing professionals and businesses in the industry, and managing director of a company with a central place in it.
We’re inspecting a row of expensive machines on the ground floor of the industrial unit in Grangemouth where Impact Solutions is based. It’s an independent laboratory formed as a spinout from BP Chemicals at Grangemouth during the creation of Ineos.
Samples of leather and plastic for car fascias are tested in the machines to see if they will deteriorate in sunlight. Luxury car firms send him samples in colours customers request. Lime-green leather was a recent sample. “You can’t buy taste,” Ross laughs. The firm works for most major manufacturers, testing everything from detergent bottles to high-pressure pipes. Your house and car will contain materials Impact Solutions has tested. The firm has machines and equipment for squeezing plastic, stretching it, heating it, melting it, deforming it, battering it, shredding it, hacking it, moulding it, drilling it, bursting it ... Not all of it is high-tech, either: a big leather punchbag apparently does a good impersonation of a human behind bumping into a plastic shower screen.
Impact Solutions also helps develop products. One of these is the bricks made from recycled plastic stacked in the yard. They can be snapped together like giant Lego to provide instant shelter for refugees in disaster zones.
FOR a big man, Ross moves quickly, explaining each machine and technique rapid-fire, pointing to pipes that have burst under extreme pressure, plastic chips that can be melted and reused, household names on products sent to be tested.
The reason we need plastics, he insists, is they are better for the job than the alternatives. Properly handled, they are less harmful to the environment.
“Glass bottles, for instance: they’ve got a higher carbon footprint, and using plastic protects the material better – it will bounce if you drop it – so it prevents food waste. The plastic film on a cucumber actually stops the cucumber going off and going to waste and can be recycled.”
The key fact for Ross is that plastic can be used time and time again: “If you get a piece of polyethylene – the plastic used for milk bottles, which is by volume the most popular plastic, it can be almost infinitely recycled. It does degrade but not a lot, tiny amounts, but you can reuse it ten, 20, 30, 40 times. You just melt it down and remould it, exactly the same as steel.”
The driver for stopping plastic pollution, as far as he is concerned, should be the sheer value of the material being lost.
“You have spent a lot of time and money making something really valuable, getting it out of the ground. Why throw that in the ocean? There are better uses than that. We need to control our own waste and take responsibility for what we are doing. I believe deeply in recycling.”
Recycling plastic should be straightforward. The two most commonly used, polyethylene and polypropylene, float, and at different levels, so are easy to separate. Impact Solutions has set up a waste recycling company and developed technology to separate plastics based on density: Ross hopes to develop it further so they can separate heavier plastics currently scavenged by hand.
What annoys him is that recycling as it stands is failing. The difficulties start with getting the facts in the first place. He says local authority recycling figures only indicate what is collected in recycling bins, not what material actually gets used again.
Most important is the fact that we export most of our plastic rubbish, exposed by the story about the Chinese refusing to take any more. Packaging industry figures suggest two-thirds is sent abroad where labour is cheap. Ross believes the true figure for exports is even higher – and it often goes to poor countries that have low environmental standards. Only two per cent of ocean plastic comes directly from Europe and the
Unfortunately in our throwaway society now we are using plastic for things we really don’t need it for