Britain’s first plasticfree town
As Penzance becomes Britain’s first plastic-free town, Joe Shute reports on how they’ve done it and what you can do, too
They call them “mermaid’s tears” in Penzance: the small plastic pellets that line the beach at low tide along with a seemingly endless flotsam of plastic bottles and bags snarled up on the sea shore. As she picks up the lids from Christmas chocolate boxes that have materialised overnight like Frisbees on the Cornish town’s main beach, Rachel Yates recalls the other more exotic forms of detritus she has encountered on the shingle: platoons of toy soldiers, a severed Hallowe’en finger and the remnants of 4.8million Lego pieces, dumped off the coast of Land’s End by the container ship Tokio Express during a storm in 1997, which still get washed up today.
“It is just excessive consumption and so much of it is stuff we don’t even need in the first place,” she says.
Last year, the 43-year-old mother of two, who was born in Penzance and works for local radio station Pirate FM, decided she had seen enough. Yates embarked on a proposal to make the town the first “plastic-free community” in Britain.
Her campaign has touched a nerve and provoked a remarkable response. In December, Penzance was officially granted the status after the town council, local schools, chamber of commerce and dozens of businesses put their weight behind the plans.
Fighting plastic pollution is one of the defining challenges of our time. In 1950, the world’s population of 2.5 billion produced 1.5 million tons of plastic; in 2016, more than 7 billion people produced more than 320million tons of plastic. Every day, approximately 8million pieces wash into the world’s oceans where they choke marine life. Around Britain’s coast, a staggering 5,000 items of marine plastic pollution are found per mile of beach.
Plastic bottles are a particularly notable offender, with on average 150 found per mile of beach. So, too, are plastic-lined coffee cups, of which a staggering 2.5billion are thrown away every year. On Thursday, Parliament’s environmental audit committee suggested a “latte levy” of 25p on every cup and a total ban altogether by 2023 unless recycling improves.
Slowly, it feels the tide is beginning to turn. Last month, Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, said he was “haunted” by scenes of plastic pollution in Blue Planet II and stressed the need for urgent action. By 2020, France will be the first country to ban all plastic cups, plates and utensils.
This week China announced it will take no more of Britain’s plastic after being inundated with 2.7million tons since 2012, and many other countries are resolving to reduce their usage after producing an estimated 100,000 tons of unrecycled plastic packaging over Christmas alone – making the isolated Cornish outpost of Penzance an unlikely beacon in the war on waste.
To win its coveted status, awarded by the campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (established in 1990 to clean up the water around Britain’s beaches), Penzance Town Council passed a motion pledging its support to all plastic-free initiatives in the town. A steering group has also been established, and regular beach cleans organised where 30 bin bags are filled with rubbish in a single morning. Churches, Brownies, the Women’s Institute and six schools have all pledged to reduce plastic use.
Initially, 13 out of some
400 businesses in the town announced they would be removing single-use plastics.
At the end of the month, Rachel Yates is organising a plastic-free clinic to persuade others to get involved. “We’re up to 30 businesses now,” she says. “And we don’t intend to stop.”
Emily Kavanaugh, co-chairman of Penzance Chamber of Commerce, who runs cosmetics shop Pure Nuff Stuff, was among the first to sign up. The 51-year-old stresses that it is a far easier process than the name might suggest. “It is not about getting rid of everything but addressing single-use plastic and looking carefully at every bit of plastic in your life,” she says.
Kavanaugh says she was moved to act after noticing the amount of dumped plastic every time she took a stroll along the beach.
“I don’t know anybody now who doesn’t go down to the beach and pick up pieces of plastic as they walk,” she says. “It has clearly got worse and requires a concerted effort from all of us.”
In her shop, Kavanaugh now sells hand and body wash bars instead of bottles, moisturising oils in reusable jars, and uses corn starch rather than polystyrene packaging.
“It is about reusing everything we can, which is a habit we as a society have just fallen out with,” she says. “That should be second nature.”
Up the road Rachel Gunderson, owner of the Honey Pot Café, has also embraced going plastic free. The 26-year-old now refuses suppliers that over-package and is instead buying as much local produce as possible – a trickle-down effect on the Penzance economy. Despite serving 60 lunches a day, the café only produces enough waste to fill one domestic wheelie bin a week.
It is not just middle-class cafés and boutiques that have embraced going plastic-free. Among those to have signed up is Fraser’s Fish and Chip shop and Jubilee Pool, while Penwith College has started banning polystyrene trays and plastic cutlery in its canteen. The Open Air Theatre in Penlee Park, which this year celebrates its 70th anniversary, has also removed all single-use plastics from its bar.
Dave Hunter, its 62-yearold events manager, admits there is an extra cost to buying properly recyclable cups, cutlery and compostable pots. But this, he says, is far outweighed by the positive reception from its 12,000 visitors a year – many of whom actively requested better recycling facilities.
“I am convinced this is going to make a difference,” he says. “People’s mindsets are changing. I look at my eight-year-old granddaughter and already she consciously thinks about litter far more than I did at her age.”
Back on the shoreline, Rachel Yates also contemplates how times have changed. As a child, she would play on this same beach by the sewerage pipes washing human waste out into the sea before the practice was eventually brought to a halt.
“We always used to fall ill because of the filthy water we were swimming in, but it was just normal back then,” she says in amazement.
Perhaps one day we will look back on our current plastic habit with similar incredulity.