Tech can save us from hair-shirt greenery

Innovation will generate the radical change needed to save our planet without plunging us into poverty

Who doesn’t want to save the world? Who doesn’t want to pass on a cleaner planet to our children and grandchildren? Who doesn’t want Sir David Attenborough to applaud them, as the veteran presenter recently hailed the crowds at plastic-free Glastonbury?

The answer is: nobody. This is the conundrum that today’s ever more activist climate campaigners must face. They have won. Like Michael Gove cringing before Greta Thunberg and banning plastic coffee twizzlers, we all feel guilty. We all agree: let’s not screw up the environment. But it’s how we do it that will determine whether we succeed or fail.

Yesterday’s news from Iceland (the

supermarket, not the country) is salutary. It had pledged to ditch plastic packaging on bananas. Unfortunately, trials showed that alternatives (like paper bands) meant lots of bananas went rotten or shrank. Of course, Iceland could have hiked prices or shouldered the costs, but higher prices would have meant selling less fruit – and threatening Iceland’s bottom line imperils 25,000 jobs.

So what’s it to be? Jobs, cheap fruit and plastic, or less fruit, fewer jobs and no plastic? In fact, we can have our bananas and eat them.

More inspiring news yesterday came with the Government’s

£60 million contribution to a £200 million investment fund to develop plastic replacement materials. That shows the path to take. Let us invest and invent our way out of this problem, taking everyone with us, lest environmentalism risk being fatally tarred as an elitist project.

Not that replacing plastic will be easy. It is – as Iceland and the whole food industry knows well – a uniquely robust, light, cheap and flexible material. And while the phrase “compostable plastic” might make us all feel better, what exactly is compostable? We might not be able to see plastic packaging that breaks down into tiny beads, but it’s still there.

Then there’s the whole knock-on nightmare, the diesel for petrol disaster, redux. Plastic replacements usually involve biomass. We get that from clearing land. So when one day we in the rich West might salute ourselves for our biodegradable coffee cups, let’s ensure rainforest in Brazil has not been razed to produce them. In fact, let us not enact any righteous bans that principally penalise the poor. Incremental change, driven by technology, is less sexy but can be just as revolutionary.

Every appliance in your house is vastly more efficient than it used to be, from your kettle to your car. Soon the latter will be electric. Even short-haul aviation may soon go the same way. Attitudes have changed in great part thanks to the incredible efforts of environmentalists. Let them not turn down the wrong path now.

To show how possible this is, think about all that turtle-choking plastic rubbish that haunts us (and stumps Iceland’s replacement efforts).

First, we need to improve the capture rate, to stop plastics entering the environment. We can penalise littering more, but it’s hard to get around the fact that the vast amount of plastic entering the planet’s bloodstream does so in the developing world. If plastic had a value, as metal does, that would change. A deposit system is one possible answer.

Second, develop alternatives, but ensure they are genuinely compostable plastics, and that their production does not involve vast land clearances. Recycled polymers – even though they’re still plastics – might offer a better compromise. So too may chemical recycling, feeding plastics back into the petrochemical processes from which they came.

Third, reuse and recycle. There are so many plastic polymers out there that we’re confused. So are councils, which have different rules about what can and can’t be recycled. The system needs to be harmonised. Meanwhile, reusable plastic containers offer a way to bypass the single-use stuff we all so loathe.

Largely it’s grim, boring work. But we are not going to save the planet with petty gestures. Thunberg is right. Radicalism is required. But innovation is best placed to provide that radical change, not preventing poor people eating fruit. In 2000, in the UK, 5 per cent of municipal waste was recycled. Today it is around 50 per cent. Did you notice? Do you remember putting on your hair shirt? I thought not.