guardian.co.uk,
Juliette Jowit, Thursday 29 December 2011
 |
| Indian children carry drinking water as they pass through a pond polluted with plastic bags and other discarded items. Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP |
Five hundred tonnes of Christmas tree lights and at least 25m bags of plastic sweet
wrappers, turkey coverings, drinks bottles and broken toys will be thrown away
by UK homes this Christmas and New Year. But only a tiny proportion of this
festive plastic waste will be recycled.
Even at
more typical times of year, only a little under one quarter of the UK's plastic
waste is recycled, but over the festive period still less escapes the tip,
according to survey by home drinks makers SodaStream. Globally, recycling of
plastics is even smaller.
The outcome
is a belief that planet Earth is being slowly strangled by a gaudy coat of
impermeable plastic waste that collects in great floating islands in the
world's oceans; clogs up canals and rivers; and is swallowed by animals, birds
and sea creatures. In many parts of the developing world it acts as a near
ubiquitous outdoor decoration, along roads in India, around villages in Africa,
and fluttering off fences across Latin America. And when it is not piling up,
it is often burned in the open, releasing noxious smoke into the surrounding
area.
From the
central parks of Moscow after the spring thaw, strewn with plastic uncovered by
the melting snows, to some of the the most remote places on Earth - the summit of Mount Everest or the Tibetan Plateau - nowhere, it seems, is free of
discarded bags, bottles, unwanted toys, used toothbrushes and lost beach shoes.
There are
no global figures on the true scale of the problem, but according to the
European Packaging and Films Association (PAFA) 265m tonnes of plastic are
produced globally each year. In the UK at least, about two thirds of this is
for packaging: which globally would translate to 170m tonnes of plastic largely
created to be disposed after one use. Even at the almost unmatched European
Union recycling rate averaging 33%, two thirds of that, or more than 113m tonnes,
would end up in landfill, being burned, or cluttering up the environment that
people and wildlife live in. Such a figure – almost certainly a huge
underestimate, and excluding more "permanent" items from car parts to
Barbie dolls – would be more than enough to cover the 48 contiguous states of
the US in plastic food wrapping. If the world recycled packaging at the rate
the US does, 15%, it would generate more than enough plastic to cover China in
plastic wrap. Every year.
A few years
ago the UK was seized by worry about plastic bags: communities went
"plastic-bag free", and the then prime minister, Gordon Brown,
announced he would talk to major retailers about phasing out their use. In the
absence of much change, his successor as PM, David Cameron, recently re-raised the idea of a national levy.
In
response, the plastics industry argues that the alternatives would be even more
wasteful in terms of extra greenhouse gas emissions.
What would
this world without plastic look like? Earlier this year Austrian-based
environmental consultancy Denkstatt imagined such a world, where farmers,
retailers and consumers use wood, metal tins, glass bottles and jars, and
cardboard to cover their goods. It found the mass of packaging would increase
by 3.6 times, it would take more than double the energy to make, and the
greenhouse gases generated would be 2.7 times higher.
To
understand this, consider the properties of plastic that make it so attractive
to use: it is durable, it is flexible and does not shatter, it can breathe - or
not, and it is extremely lightweight. As a result, food and drink are protected
from damage and kept for lengths of time previously unimaginable. The PAFA says
average spoilage of food between harvest and table is 3% in the developed
world, compared with 50% in developing countries where plastic palates, crates,
trays, film and bags are not so prolific. Once the food reaches people's homes
its lifespan is also increased - in the case of a shrink-wrapped cucumber from
two to 14 days. A less obvious benefit of plastic packaging is that by being
much lighter than alternatives it greatly reduces the fuel needed to transport
the goods. Because of the huge carbon content of our diets, it is estimated
that for every tonne of carbon produced by making plastic, five tonnes is
saved, says Barry Turner from the PAFA .A more surprising point is made by
Friends of the Earth's waste campaigner Julian Kirby, who points out that
because it is inert in landfill, plastic waste buried in the ground is a
counterintuitive way of "sequestering" carbon and so avoiding it
adding to global warming and climate change.
This focus
on carbon and climate change, however, ignores the very reasons plastic bags,
and plastic packaging generally, first gripped the public imagination – namely
that it is such a highly visible result of our throw-away society.
Wales,
Ireland and other countries have opted to levy a tax on plastic bags to deter
their use but making deeper cuts to plastic waste will need other options too.
Many
"ethical" products from sandwiches to nappy bags have switched to
biodegradable plastics, made either from natural products such as cornstarch or
by using a special additive which helps breakdown the plastic. However, Turner
suggests this will remain a niche, because the process is expensive and – in
his words – is "destroying" a resource that could be recycled.
Recycling
plastic is particularly hard, because there are so many types, and because
plastic melts below the boiling point of water, making it hard to remove
contamination. Increasing recycling is, though, one of the two key areas
focused on by the plastics industry, which estimates if every council in the UK
operated at the rates achieved by the best local authority for each type of
plastic – PET bottles, cartons, trays, bags and so on – the country could raise
total plastic recycling from 23% to 45%. "On the go recycling" –
currently almost non-existent – also needs to be dramatically improved by
things like separated waste bins, or simply more bins in public places, said
Turner.
To meet the
industry's self-imposed target of zero plastic waste to landfill by 2020,
however, it is largely looking to incineration, which is highly controversial
with environment groups and local communities who worry about how waste ash is disposed of and breathing in emissions from the plants – despite the Health
Protection Agency giving modern plants the go ahead as not damaging to health.
Greenhouse gas emissions from such plants are also high: equivalent to 540g of carbon dioxide (CO²e) per kilowatt hour, more than gas power and more than 100 times that for nuclear.
Instead,
environment and wildlife campaigners want far more attention to the "waste
hierarchy" – reduce, reuse, recycle. To drive this change, the government
this month proposed increasing all recycling targets, raising plastics to 50%.
If enforced, that should encourage innovations, such as more food recycling
(which research suggests reduces over-purchasing and so the need for
packaging), and the recent development of a new dye for black plastic bags
which, unlike the traditional compound, can be detected by the automatic
sorting machines.
Further
afield, 47 industry groups from around the world have joined forces to fund
research and schemes to stop plastic from getting into the seas and oceans.
While on land, countries without plastic recovery regulations could adopt a
system used in several European countries like Belgium, where manufacturers are
responsible for recovering a percentage of the plastic they produce. "The
idea of producer responsibility is one of the ones people are most agreed on,
but no-one's sure how," said Kirby.
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