by Anne MacLennan
A fascinating study by Everyday Plastic and the Environmental Investigation Agency tracked 40 bundles of soft plastic packaging deposited at English supermarket recycling collection points. The tracked bundles travelled more than 25,000 km through a complex waste system across the UK, Europe and beyond, presumably emitting fossil-fuelled gases from HGVs as they went. 17 reached a final destination. Their fate was to be turned into fuel pellets, incinerated in the UK, incinerated overseas, down-cycled in the UK or down-cycled overseas. Those which did not reach a final destination were last located at the Eurokey reprocessing facility, at supermarket distribution centres, with another waste handler or trundling down a European motorway. Three trackers failed.
There’s lots of background and fuller information in the full report or watch the short but hard-hitting video.
We can’t blame it all on the supermarkets of course. Soft plastics are inherently difficult to recycle and the infrastructure just isn’t there yet, but it would be helpful if supermarkets just used a lot less of the stuff.
The Co-op did a trial collection of soft plastics in 50 stores including Broadford in 2020. ‘As much as possible’ was recycled into rubbish bin liners. They now have over 2,000 stores taking many different types of soft plastic packaging, though they can’t guarantee recycling of third party packaging, and multiple layer plastic may end up being incinerated.
WRAP (Global Waste and Resources Action Programme) calculates that if all the UK’s apples, bananas and potatoes were sold loose, it would save 60,000 tonnes of food waste and reduce plastic packaging by 8,800 tonnes per year, together saving more than 80,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent.
Plastics and human health
Plastics are really not good for our health as detailed in this hefty commissioned report. Working with plastic causes disease, injury and deaths, from extracting the raw coal, oil and gas, producing the plastic itself or making plastic textiles and then recycling. In addition, communities living close to plastic production and disposal sites have adverse health impacts affecting unborn babies to adults.
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Plastics are complex synthetic chemical materials usually made from fossil fuels. They are highly variable with thousands of chemicals to choose from as additives for the basic polymer to provide the vast range of characteristics that plastics need for particular uses e.g. flexibility, stability or water repellence. Many of the harmful effects associated with plastics are due to these chemicals which are often toxic, including carcinogens and ‘forever chemicals’.
Global plastic production was less than 2 megatonnes in 1950, up to 460 megatonnes in 2019 and still accelerating, especially for single use, so multinational fossil-carbon corporations are switching from producing fuels to plastics manufacture. Continued demand for plastics ensures a continued reason (in their financial forecasts) to extract oil and gas and thereby emit greenhouse gases.
Plastic manufacture already emits about 3.7% of global greenhouse gases and this is set to increase markedly despite the fact that ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster’ as stated by some of the most respected climate scientists.
Plastics and their chemicals cause widespread pollution, creating 22 megatons of environmental waste every year. The UK throws away 290,000 tonnes of plastic bags and wrapping every year. We all have a role to play in reducing the demand for plastic. Governments, supermarkets and petrochemical companies have to realise that consumers don’t want ever-increasing plastic production, pollution and problems. But we have to be serious about telling and showing them. It’s urgent. Check out WRAP’s guidance on reducing household plastic packaging and food waste (spoiler – includes removing best-before dates).