Why don’t environmental influencers engage with the plastics industry?

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Sustainability, the marine plastics crisis, microplastics and carbon wastage are all important factors for consumers, politicians and the plastics industry alike, and out of all of these groups, it is the plastics industry that is left screaming into the vacuum.

Why, when plastics is top of the agenda, is the industry’s knowledge and understanding of the broader value chain being left as a right of reply, rather than a valuable insight into the truth of the matter based on experience, expertise and the fact that most of us in plastics want exactly what everybody else wants – to prevent plastics from doing harm to our natural world?

I read the former UK Green Party leader Natalie Bennett’s piece ‘Why the UK Plastic Pact doesn’t go far enough’ for The Ecologist (April 30th 2018) with interest, which quickly gave way to exasperation and frustration. I am a big admirer of the Green Party but Bennett’s article was neither informed nor productive. It merely serves to fan the flames of discontent of consumers who are right to be angered by the scenes played out in the news and on Blue Planet II. It is clear she has not engaged in a conversation with the industry on the matter, and has based her article entirely on her own layperson’s opinion – a dangerous thing for somebody with such influence.

The ambition for the British government to ban non-recyclable plastic packaging is entirely right. There is too much plastic waste building up in the world for us to take an ostrich position – whether you are in the industry or not. Bennett goes on to make the point that just because the plastic packaging we are left with is deemed ‘recyclable’, does not mean it will be recycled.

Bennett hits the nail on the head – the issue we should be focusing in on is why are these recyclable plastics not being recycled? In the UK, we have very good kerbside recycling collection services in many parts of the country and Wales’ recycling rate is second best in the world, with 63.8 per cent of municipal solid waste including plastics being collected for recycling.

This figure, as impressive as it is, still leaves a lot of room for improvement, but Bennett makes the valid point that only one-third of all single-use plastic waste produced in Britain is recycled every year, so the recycling industry has even more of a gap to plug.

But rather than focus on the burning issue of why these recyclable materials are not being recycled, Bennett suggests these single-use plastic products are “unnecessary” and ought not to be produced at all.

‘We used to manage without plastic packaging’

Namedropping Julia Hartley-Brewer – who, ironically, was a British Plastics Federation guest speaker at the association’s annual dinner in 2016 – Bennett said the broadcaster had stated on Talk Radio that surely we’ve managed to live without plastic packaging before, therefore we can do so again.

How long ago were we living without plastic packaging? Were there eight billion people on the planet then all clamouring for water, for medicine, for food? How do you propose delivering the above to all of us without plastics at the same levels of wastage in terms of the packaged product and carbon? It’s impossible at the volumes we need, and at a price (both monetarily and in terms of carbon) that we can afford.

In the UK, there simply isn’t the appetite for all of us to join co-operative allotments and eat seasonally as a community – who on earth has the time? I barely have time to mow the grass in my back garden. I wish I could do more, grow more, but mine and many other people’s lifestyles dictate that gentle pottering in the garden is often low down the urgency list in our downtime. Instead, we have grown used to buying red peppers cleanly packaged in threes, we choose sachets of pre-prepared ingredients because we love our varied diets despite being short on time for cooking, our coffee is vacuum packed for freshness in the cupboard if we only make ourselves one cup a day, we grab a packet of crisps on the run when we’re peckish, and our paracetamol comes blister packed for hygiene and ease of delivery.

How would we get all of these without plastics? And do consumers really want a world without them? No. The fact is, there will always be consumers who will buy what they fancy for their tea that night, regardless of how far away the vegetables were grown, convenience foods and ingredients will always be sniffed out by the tired worker looking for a quick supper, coffee needs to be packaged for freshness or consumers will stop buying it, and the day we return to the chemists with brown bottles for our paracetamol to be refilled is the day Mrs Goggins is made Home Secretary. Not when it’s available at 32 pence from the supermarket in packets of 18 caplets.

The plastics packaging train has left the station but instead of blowing it up, why don’t we look a little harder at re-routing it? After all, that train is delivering vital goods to everybody along the line.

Not addressing the real issues

Bennett’s ill-informed article says it is good to stop producing black plastic trays, when of course companies like Impact Solutions are using LinkedIn and other platforms to scream at the top of their lungs that the issue with black plastic trays is not that they cannot be recycled, but that the sorting technology to pick black plastics needs investment.

Bennett’s ill-informed article also suggests that these unrecyclable plastics end up in “wasteful, polluting incineration” facilities. When really, European municipal waste-to-energy facilities filter and collect the toxic chemicals produced when unrecyclable materials are incinerated, and incinerators in Europe in turn prevent up to 50 million tonnes of fossil fuels from being consumed annually by producing heat and electricity for millions of homes.

Bennett’s ill-informed article does not even touch upon the fact that even though waste exports are no longer being sent to China, where recycling and incineration are regulated, there is nothing preventing waste collectors from sending their refuse to South-East Asian and African countries where landfilling and incineration are not regulated, adding to the issue of global waste rather than addressing it.

The priority for decision-makers should be investing in European sorting and recycling innovation and incentivising end markets for recycled material, followed by making all plastic packaging recyclable, and finally doing away with the plastic packaging that does not bring value to the supply chain environmentally.

My last point begs the question of ‘what are the alternatives’? The way I see it, you are either causing more waste by seeking out other materials to do the job of plastic, or you are asking far too much of your average consumer. Will we be making our own yoghurt in glass jars at home? Some of us do, most of us do not. Will we be asking for our paracetamol jar to be refilled at the chemist? I’m not sure that’s what people want. Will we be unable to buy a drink for a long journey when we fill the car up at the petrol station and don’t have a cup? I can’t see Coca-Cola shrugging in apathy to that notion either. In any case, the consumer doesn’t want it.

Plastic-free shops have always been there. I grew up in Leicester, home to Europe’s largest covered market and there’s nothing you can’t get there and take home in a paper bag or container of your choosing, so while it is good in theory for supermarkets to offer plastic-free choices for consumers, marketing your ‘plastic-free’ aisles smacks of greenwashing rather than a real sea-change that will benefit the environment, because it does not and cannot include every product in the store. Bring your own container for your bleach? I don’t think so.

Glass half broken

Glass is pretty much the best barrier material in the packaging sphere, but it’s brittle, heavy and hard to stack efficiently. There’s a reason why boxed wine is cheap, and it’s got a lot to do with the fact you can fit more litres of wine onto one truck when it’s packaged in stackable cartons, delivering pretty much 100 per cent of your delivery load every time using much less fuel. Wine has its own snobbery issues to overcome where glass vs plastics are concerned, but can you imagine everything currently packaged as a carton being instead decanted into jars and bottles? The breakage, the extra expense for fuel per delivery and the need for more deliveries would undoubtedly be passed onto the customer.

Going without plastics for convenience food and snacks like drinks bottles, crisps, sandwiches and other ingredients is unfair on the consumer, who is merely shopping within their means to meet their own needs and very probably recycles their PET and HDPE and re-uses their shopping bags as much as possible.

Bennett’s suggestions, in addition to being utterly wasteful and unworkable, would punish consumers both in terms of how they manage their busy lives, and their pockets.

This is why people with influence should have a conversation with the plastics industry, just as The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and WRAP are championing important points of view that matter to both sides, taking into account the wider implications for the supply chain. We are all in agreement that the ubiquity of plastics in the natural environment is abhorrent, but the solution to the problem requires actually engaging in conversation with the plastics industry and not simply publishing reactionary editorials based on little more than your own feelings.

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