Dear Editor
I was interested in the story of Anthony Wilkinson and his campaign against plastic straws in Islington, (Gazette Feb 15th) tweeting pubs and restaurants one by one.
Suddenly everybody is alarmed about the scale of plastic pollution, especially after David Attenborough’s TV programme showing what it does to wildlife and the oceans. Single issue campaigns with clear limits have sometimes been very successful – lead in petrol and the effect of chloroflurocarbons on the ozone layer are good examples, where we now take the results of the campaign as a given. I hope Anthony is just as successful.
There are today campaigns to cut down plastic waste and recycle more, and all are desirable and well intentioned, but the real problem is an underlying one. Plastic is so universal, so convenient so twenty-first century ubiquitous, that we almost don’t notice it. Every single use coffee cup contains plastic and the UK has only two facilities with the equipment for recycling them. A billion cups a year are so much un-recycled waste taking up space in a landfill or even burnt in an incinerator. A plastic “squeezy”; bottle of sauce or ketchup is more convenient; liquid soap in a plastic dispenser is handy; supermarket and drug store shelves are heavy with single use plastic bottles of shampoo and conditioner and much washing and washing up liquid and clothes freshener is in single use plastic bottles too. Even wet wipes – guilty of blocking our sewers – are not biodegradable because of the plastic they contain. And every plastic handled toothbrush ever made in 40+ years still exits today!
Of course plastic does have advantages – a single use lightweight plastic bottle of water (or Coke) is lighter than lugging around my much heaver reusable bottle filled with water, and I also lug around a plastic carrier bag and re-usable takeaway coffee cup I got from Amnesty International. I had a brain tumour which means I need to use a straw – I carry my own, wash them and re-use them … it is single use which is a major part of the problem. Plastic is never disposable, ever. Green Party Deputy Leader Amelia Womack wrote recently of the near impossibility of her serious attempt to have a plastic free week and trying to find a shampoo not in a plastic bottle. The Green Party has campaigned for years on the subject of plastic waste.
There are things we can do – charging for plastic bags has helped and charging manufacturers a levy on their packaging if it can’t be recycled might help. If every bottle and can was worth money – as is the case in Norway and Sweden – we’d be less likely to just dump it and kids might pick it up for the extra cash, but the answer lies in our laziness in saving the planet. Take a plastic spoon or fork – make the plastic, mould it into a spoon or fork, transport it by road to a cafe or supermarket, use it once then throw it away, just because we can’t be bothered to wash a metal one. Even Islington town hall uses single use plastic glasses in its committee rooms to save arranging a cleaner to wash reusable ones!
Mike Crowson
Islington Green Party