Vocal Voices

It is beginning to look as though the push by Sky and all the articles everywhere about the polluted seas, as well as Blue Planet II, might have got through the skulls of MPs. They, belatedly, now want to do something to save the oceans, to save the fish, to save the world. And let us not forget that China will soon stop taking in UK plastic waste for recycling - ah!

All good stuff, or so you would think - then comes the detail. Firms using plastic packaging should pay more for the waste they create via a sliding scale of taxes. Deposit schemes for plastic bottles. A minimum 50% recycled plastic content in plastic bottles. Getting firms to simplify packaging and use fewer different types of plastics and to invest in alternatives to plastic packaging. There is a need for all this because it is 'so difficult' to separate out all the different plastics.... and landfill is so much cheaper. And the extra costs of all the MPs' schemes will not hurt the producers or first time users, those costs will filter down to..... us.

Fine, spiffing, marvellous! It will not save the oceans, though, as the UK and Europe are not massive sea polluters - in the grand scheme of things - nor is the first world in general. Plastic pollution in the seas is largely a third world phenomenon and one mainly from South America, Africa and South East Asia.

Meanwhile, over in the scientific world, there is a process known as pyrolysis, where plastic long-chain molecules can be broken down into smaller hydrocarbon molecules - oil from plastic. It has been known about since the 1980s, but a similar process turning coal to oil has been about since the 1930s.

There are various patented methods and some of them use unsorted plastics - the 'so difficult' to separate stuff - as a feedstock. This immediately cuts out the big problem for plastic recycling - black plastics. Those are the 'end of line' plastics that cannot be coloured any further, and they are in themselves a 'pollutant' to the recycling industry. Make use of them and we could recycle everything. The plants obviously require energy to operate, but some of them produce LPG, petrol, kerosene and fuel oil, in various quantities. The LPG can then be used to help fuel the energy requirements of the heat exchanger.

The big problem is that the set-up costs for an industrial scale plant are beyond all but the very largest corporations. However, there are times when some financial cost have to be put aside for the greater good, and this is where government should step in. If all large cities in the UK were to have one such facility capable of taking in plastic waste from the wider area there is the possibility of eradicating plastic to landfill (and the seas) and at the same time producing enough fuel to operate the vehicles used to collect the waste, run buses and heat buildings such as schools and council offices - a win-win.

What am I thinking? The obvious answer is to tax the problem out of existence. Silly me.

Standard MP's reaction I'm afraid - tax it.
We are too fat? Slam a "sin tax" on fatty food.
Polluting cars in city centres? Congestion charge tax.
We drink too much? Minimum price per unit of alcohol.

All of which raise money for the government and do nothing to actually fix the problem.

Just wait until we start being charged a standard rate per mile to drive, that's all...

This has come to the fore again with the "news" that, as from today, China has stopped the wholesale import of the world's rubbish. It will now be selective over what it takes in and most of that will be defunct electronics from which gold, silver and other rare earth metals can be extracted to use again. The UK exports mainly paper and plastic and China is no longer interested.

It is over a year since China made this announcement and yet it appears to have sneaked up on the UK. The Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, has admitted such. Now, the latest bleat from the recycling industry is that we do not have the capacity to deal with our own rubbish, so we will incinerate or send most of it to landfill. In the meantime we will stockpile thousands of tonnes of the stuff until we can, hopefully, cope with it.

There should not be a "meantime", we should already be up an running, in fact we should have been dealing with our own crap decades ago. The law should be so tough that we do not produce more waste than we can deal with in our own back yard and much of that should be of natural biodegradable materials. If that means that whole sectors of the economy look long an hard at their packaging policies then so be it. We desperately need to be doing something practical and not just bleating about the problem.

I agree with all that. Part of the problem of an ever growing population is the corresponding growth in the amount of rubbish we produce. We have been able to get round this by shipping it off to China; unless another country volounteers to take our garbage, we will have to deal with it. Best guess will be incineration.

I can't see how we can possibly stop producing so much rubbish, given our current methods of selling.
When I was a lad there was very little, if any, factory-packed food on sale. The assistants in the food
shops were highly skilled at dispensing food items, which meant that the only wrapping material used
was grease-proof inner paper and brown outer paper. There were no plastic containers at all. Butter,
cheese, bacon, fish, etc., were all cut and packaged to order. It is, obviously, virtually impossible to
revert back to the methods used then, so, there doesn't seem to be any easy answer to this problem.

Aggers, what you say is perfectly true, especially regarding food, but that does not mean things cannot change. We have done wonders with regards to clothes packaging, where most things are now on a hanger or a shelf, we could do the same with many other things.

I often ask myself why vegetables come in pack sizes and not loose - it is not as if they need to be plastic wrapped. It also bugs me no end to see individual veg such as cauli, cabbage, broccoli, cucumbers and celery wrapped in clingfilm or in a plastic bag, it is all so unnecessary.

The same goes for cooked meats. Many of us only want a few slices for one day, we do not want, and cannot eat, the five or six slice packs in the 'safe to consume' period. And, as you say, uncooked food was once sold and wrapped at the counter. I now use Morrisons for the deli and for meat and fish as I can still buy them 'the old'way' and they come at the same price per kg as the pre-packed stuff.

My view is that IF we all started to leave as much unnecessary packaging as possible in the supermarket trolley instead of taking it home-THEN the supermarkets MIGHT decide it's time they started to cut down on it and to get their suppliers to start reducing their unnecessary packaging.

Workingman wrote:The same goes for cooked meats. Many of us only want a few slices for one day, we do not want, and cannot eat, the five or six slice packs in the 'safe to consume' period. And, as you say, uncooked food was once sold and wrapped at the counter. I now use Morrisons for the deli and for meat and fish as I can still buy them 'the old'way' and they come at the same price per kg as the pre-packed stuff.

We do the same at our supermarket, order the number of slices of ham we need, not buy the prepacked stuff. We have next to no food waste.

I would say, on balance, Mrs O and I are putting out far more recycling each week for collection than household waste, and it's paper, tins and glass rather than plastic.

Looking forward, though, liquids must be a big problem. I can't see us, as a country, going back to glass bottles of milk or juice rather than plastic containers or those Tetrapak cartons which aren't recyclable ......

Could it be that tax IS the answer?

A government committee has suggested a 'Latte Levy' of 25p on takeaway coffee cups and the coffeerati are up in arms - "It's not fair", "It's picking on coffee drinkers", "It will put up costs".

Good. Bung the cost on the purchase price of the cups to the coffee chains and let them decide whether to pass it on. Then do the same for plastic bottles, of all kinds, pizza boxes, ready meals, tins.

If we are going to clean up our act let's get serious about it instead of wringing our hands, or sitting on them. If the only way things will change is to hit us, the end user, in the pocket then so be it.

£1.75 per week for your daily ration of H20 in its own precious bottle or fill up a reusable bottle for peanuts before going out is a tough choice: NOT!