Imagine that. A planet covered in plastic. We’re already accustomed to seeing beautiful views ruined by plastic litter. But, as horrible as it is to imagine a carpet of fizzy drinks bottles and crisp packets covering land and sea, this is not merely aesthetic. The threat posed by plastic that has ended up in the ocean has recently been the subject of extensive media attention and growing public concern: of course, millions of tonnes of plastic are also polluting the land and soil. But it is the sea where scientists and campaigners are focusing many of their most urgent efforts: not only is it very hard to get rid of plastic once it is in the marine environment, but, as research emerges, it seems there are some serious threats that must be tackled now.
‘Everywhere we have looked we have now found plastic,’ Professor Richard Thompson had told me on my visit to his Marine Litter Research Unit laboratory at Plymouth University. It’s a statement that continues to haunt me. Microplastics have been found on beaches from Fernando de Noronha in the mid-Atlantic to Antarctica. They’ve even been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the global oceans.
Over the last twenty years we have truly been plumbing new depths, in the form of submersibles and ROVs, remotely operated vehicles that crawl along the deepest trenches of the ocean and record what’s going on in this incredible universe 6,000 m below. This has changed our thinking. We now know that the Abyssal and Hadal zones of the world’s oceans are not the cold, dead zones that they were once imagined to be, but biodiverse ecosystems, home to coral and hosts of living organisms. At this depth, life is slow: it takes a lot of time for plants and animals to grow and replenish. Contaminants in the form of plastic pollution cry disaster for this delicate ecosystem.
There is still research to be done to get a real understanding of the impact, but if plastic fragments are now everywhere, and culturally the material is so embedded in our patterns of behaviour and our lives, then you might think my suggestion that we can turn the tide is somewhat optimistic. You might also ask what business do I have, trying to recruit you to the cause?
Over the last few years I’ve been on what can only be described as an epic plastic adventure. I wanted to discover the extent of plastic’s grip on our home lives, but also on commerce and in culture, and to understand its environmental impact and the implications for future generations.
I’ve interviewed plastics apologists, deniers, enthusiasts and lovers. Among them plastic is often referred to as the ‘skin of commerce’ – the implication being that whatever the downsides, we can’t get by without it. I’ve always thought their assumptions worthy of interrogation.
Don’t get me wrong: I was as immersed in the Plastic Age as anybody else. In fact, we’re all children of the Synthetic Century. In common with most other kids born in the 1970s, I spent my childhood obsessively building with those small, coloured blocks of acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) more commonly known as Lego. Yes, I was the archetypal Lego brat, screaming blue murder if any of the monolithic structures I had carefully built were dismantled or damaged in any way by Hoovering. Only my beloved Barbie surpassed my love of Lego. Barbie’s general sophistication and glamour, to my seven-year-old eyes, eclipsed the fact that she was essentially a number of different bits of plastic. Or, to be more precise, a rotationally moulded co-polymer for the arms; a body of ABS (like my Lego bricks) and hair made of vinylidene chloride polymers (known in the trade as Saran).8
Now, things are changing. Kids will soon be able to add garden foliage to their Lego landscapes made entirely from plant-based plastic sourced from sugar cane.
But, probably like yours, my childhood was relentlessly plasticised. When my neighbours brought me back a Mickey Mouse cup from Disneyland Florida with a twirly plastic straw, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread – which I was also very fond of. Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to stay with my grandparents for the summer holidays, to find that my grandad did not share my enthusiasm. He shook his head. ‘It’s terrible that we waste plastic on stuff like this,’ he said.
This was an unusual attitude circa 1981, and I remember it well, not least because it was a rebuke from grandparents from whom I usually had a 100 per cent approval rating. I noticed my grandad also took a dim view of the plastic laundry liquid dispensers then coming on to the market and relentlessly advertised on TV. In fact, he seemed to take a dim view of every brilliant consumer product lavishly constructed from plastic. Grandad was vocal on the subject, and told me in no uncertain terms that plastic was made from oil and that once you made something from plastic, it would take hundreds of years to degrade. It was clear that he thought this was an enormously bad idea.
Not only did he dislike the material, he seemed to make huge efforts to stop it getting into his bungalow, which, alarmingly, he declared a plastic-free zone. When we walked into town, he would loudly decry the use of polythene grocery bags at the checkout, loading his shopping into string bags that he carried everywhere. To my utter mortification, on some trips he actually unpeeled the plastic wrapping from his grocery shop and left it at the checkout, an act of rebellion covered by the Chester Chronicle on one memorable outing.
I know you’re thinking, typical hippy type, but that wasn’t exactly it. Before he retired, my grandad worked as a scientist for Shell, the global oil company. He was hardly J. R. Ewing, but even so, given that plastic is made from oil, and inextricably linked to the fossil fuel industry, his professional career meant that he was heavily invested in oil, so his stance was highly unusual. It also had an effect on me. My grandad’s total and public rejection of plastic at the supermarket till may have filled me with horror at the time, but a seed had been planted. It took a while to germinate into a real interest, as I motored through my teens and twenties consuming fast fashion, fast food and generally living it up in a whirl of consumerism. But now, all these years later, I have to concede that he was on to something.
THE ECO AGONY AUNT
I’m fascinated by the flow of consumer goods into our lives and how that changes the earth’s prospects. That means for many years I’ve been carefully scrutinising this rapid transit of ‘stuff’, then trying to figure out where it comes from and what the impact of this ‘stuff’ is. Somehow my strange pastime has transitioned from a hobby into my profession. As a journalist, in essence my job is to find out the true cost of stuff. So it’s no coincidence that in 2015 I helped make a documentary, The True Cost, finding out the real cost of a collective addiction to fast fashion and bulging wardrobes. Spoiler: the results aren’t too pretty.
With a weekly column in the Observer magazine, in 2004 my job description morphed into what can only be described as an agony aunt for the planet. If I had questions, I found that many other people did too. Running for thirteen years, we swept across the most extraordinary range of topics, from huge global issues such as ‘Will corruption charges in the Brazilian political class affect the efforts to preserve the rainforest?’ to the more prosaic, ‘Can I put a margarine tub in my recycling?’ To be fair, the recycling question was more my kind of investigation. But to my surprise, no thanks to the extraordinary array of local authority recycling schemes across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (over three hundred at the last count – all subtly different and with some variations within the same postcode!), it was often more difficult to come up with a cohesive answer on recycling plastic containers than on the biophysical effects of corruption on rainforest biomes thousands of miles away.
In the early noughties, activism on climate change was in vogue, magazines ran special issues and celebrities seemed increasingly keen to become the public face of environmental campaigns. This was not universally applauded by the green community, which was pretty puritanical and had a major problem with the hypocrisy of actors and singers flying about the world speaking on climate issues. I get the point, but in Western society there are very few non-hypocrites, and I happen to find it really commendable when A-listers fast-track and amplify environmental messages. Let’s face it, they do have an appeal that your average eco warrior doesn’t.
Besides, on many issues I found the stars to be deeply committed. On one memorable occasion, actor Woody Harrelson came into the Guardian offices for a meeting about our annual Ethical Awards. After a bathroom break, he returned to the boardroom, furious, brandishing the soap dispenser, which evidently he’d just wrenched off the wall. To Harrelson the antimicrobial sanitiser from a detested multinational was beyond the pale, on the grounds that it was disruptive to the ecological system and bad for human health. We meekly promised to make some changes.
HOW I BECAME A PLASTIC DETECTIVE
From 2004, the ten years I spent answering my readers’ questions was a hugely exciting and galvanising period for a new form of sustainability that was bringing together thirty years of earth science and mixing that data with ethical consumerism. We were really trying to develop a new blueprint – or ‘greenprint’ – for life, one where every individual could make better decisions; and place the planet at the centre of those. At heart, sustainability9 is pretty simple: it’s about leaving the earth in the same or better shape for the next generation.
And yet, no one seemed to be listening, particularly when it came to plastic. Almost all plastic is made from oil. Let’s be in no doubt: plastic is a fossil fuel product, and it needs to be considered in this context.
BIG OIL
I have a habit of referring to different types of plastic as ‘oily’. Some, like slimy cling film and rigid plastic boxes, feel more oily than others. But really all plastics are oily. In fact, of all the plastic we consume, 90 per cent is virgin plastic, made of oil.10 In effect, this is a double insult to the environment: not only are we choosing to make new plastic instead of recycling what we’ve discarded, but to compound matters, we are also making it from fossil fuel.
Making plastics requires the heat-cracking of fossil fuel feedstocks, usually derived from crude oil, which is then converted into reactive hydrocarbons. After that comes polymerisation. Chemical additives are a key ingredient, giving plastic its different characteristics so that we can tailor it to our heart’s desire.
At the current rate of production, for every barrel of oil extracted from the earth, 8 per cent becomes plastic: 4 per cent is the raw material used to make the plastic and the other 4 per cent is the fuel that powers the polymerisation process.11 Plastic binds us to the fossil fuel economy, linking us directly to resource-conflicts and climate change. Our mission should be to decouple from oil with urgency. So while that 8 per cent figure might sound insignificant, isn’t it counter-intuitive, at the very least, to be moving in entirely the wrong direction?
In an ideal world, of course, everybody would be working together to make sure that we curb our dependency on fossil fuels. But on planet plastic, the energy is moving in the opposite direction. Together the fossil fuel, plastic and chemical industries – hand in glove – are gearing up to unleash even more plastic on the world.
GET READY FOR THE GLUT
In the next five years, America is set to surpass Russia to become the world’s biggest oil producer. You’ll have heard of fracking, the shorthand for hydraulic fracturing. This is the process in which rock is fractured by a liquid injected into it under high pressure in order to force open existing fissures to extract oil or shale gas. In parts of the UK, such as Sussex and Lancashire, plans to frack have been met by community resistance and blockades. In the US, large-scale fracking has led to a shale gas boom, and the price of conventional oil has plummeted as shale gas floods the market.
You might be wondering how on earth a fracking boom in the US has any connection to plastics in our lives in the UK. Well, it does. The shale gas boom is almost certainly about to be converted into plastic production that will flood the world market with new low-price plastic products, at a scale and volume never seen before.
The shale gas flowing in from West Texas is used as feedstock for ethylene, the building block for most plastics. And the US, already awash with more plastic than it knows what to do with, is aggressively looking for overseas markets to fill with this oncoming deluge of cheap-as-chips plastic. As chemical companies making plastic resins along the Gulf Coast scramble to find new markets, we consumers need to be armed and alert, and ready for the onslaught.
Fossil fuel industries have already taken a hit with the growth of electric vehicles (EVs). As transport severs its connection with petrol (something that seemed unthinkable just a few short years ago), the oil industry is looking for another outlet. Propelled by shale gas, polyethylene production most commonly used in packaging – where we already have a big problem – is about to take off.
Because there is no doubt: since 2010, $180 billion has gone into new plastic manufacturing plants across the Atlantic, and that translates into an almighty push to sell billions of pounds of extra polyethylene.12 The world’s most common plastic, used to make bottles and containers, as well as other common-or-garden plastic products, polyethylene is the plastic that already features most heavily in our lives. And in our rubbish bins, and in litter lining streets and motorway verges, and in the ocean and on the world’s beaches.
Make no mistake, we have a fight on our hands. But don’t be intimidated: you are about to become the frontline of resistance.
Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have ignored the creep of plastic. Increasingly the ubiquity of plastic packaging and the inability or unwillingness of retailers to tackle the influx was driving my readers crazy. More than half of my Observer postbag was taken up with recycling and packaging conundrums. On a literal level, it was also hard to ignore: every Sunday the magazine containing my environmental musings would be generously wrapped in a particularly annoying plastic film. This did not escape the attention of readers, or indeed Private Eye, who mentioned it frequently. In fact, I’ve never been able to get a breakthrough on this. It is the supermarkets that have driven the wrapping of Sunday newspapers in plastic to stop all the hundreds of advertising inserts – a pet hate of many readers – falling out.
The old journalism adage, ‘follow the money’ became, for me, ‘follow the oil’, and as we now know, a lot of that oil becomes plastic. So I followed the plastic, sometimes literally. I pestered CEOs in boardrooms and I staked out landfill dumps; I joined beach cleans and I helped to release turtles back into the wild. Some of this I’ve documented in newspapers and on TV. All the time my readers kept writing to me with a certain amount of anger about the surfeit of plastic in society. I heard from many women fed up with plastic bags – given out liberally in all UK supermarkets – attaching themselves around the heel of their shoe on a windy day walking down a high street.
From time to time I would get to debate plastic pollution with representatives of the plastic industry’s members’ organisation, called the British Plastics Federation and the Industry Council for Plastic and the Environment, INCPEN. My adversaries seemed to me to be perpetually bad-tempered, or perhaps it was just that they certainly made it clear that I was an irritant (far more annoying than plastic pollution). In one surreal exchange I took part in on BBC Radio 5, a plastic industry representative tried to argue that a plastic bag levy would be downright dangerous and actually increase the amount of plastic that society used. The plastic industry allied with major retailers and manufacturers who were heavy plastic consumers. The message was loud and clear: they were producing plastic packaging in all its glorious formats, from plastic bags to takeaway cartons, because the consumer wanted it. Plastic packaging was convenient for all for us, and ungrateful naysayers like me needed to get back in their box.
I realised that I had to prove that most consumers did not want excess plastic in their lives, and that many were also extremely angry about having to deal with it. Back in December 2005, I persuaded four families to save their rubbish for a month to demonstrate exactly what they were throwing away over Christmas.13 Every piece of waste the families collected was weighed and analysed, and plastic was by far and away the dominant material. We were particularly alert to over-packaging, where plastic had been used unnecessarily.
One of the most horrible examples we found was a shrink-wrapped coconut from the retailer Morrisons. Given that coconuts famously arrive in their own protective shell, I argued this was unnecessary waste. The retailer fought back on two points: first, that the plastic film was necessary in order to attach a metallised sticker with a barcode, and then – when this didn’t fly – that the fibrous hair of coconuts might be inhaled by customers, and therefore constituted a health and safety hazard. We talked. Eventually Morrisons agreed that they would stop shrink-wrapping their coconuts.
Any sense of victory was short-lived, however. The following week another reader contacted us to say that the retailer had moved on to shrink-wrapping cucumbers. I began to feel like a crusading greengrocer, forever doing battle on unnecessarily plastic-packaged fruit and vegetables. But I did learn from these encounters. I realised then, in a way I hadn’t before, just what a grip plastic had on our everyday lives, and I started collecting data that would eventually lead to strategies to help households stop the flow into their lives. It is these experiences that have set me on the road to the tips and advice laid out in the pages of this book.
One of the things that emerged for me from working with the families back in 2005, and every other time a household has been kind enough to let me move in and root through their dustbin, is just how complex our recycling system is. While we all have a moan about different boxes and bins and a lack of harmonised recycling in the UK, it seemed obvious to me that some of the actual plastic wrappings on everyday products had become so complicated that you needed a PhD in polymeric science to understand which bin they should go into (for more on recycling, see chapter 14, here).
I came across a piece written by and for the plastic packaging industry that shed some light. ‘The average consumer probably has no idea that the packaging of a typical product he or she might pick up weekly may have as many as six layers of plastic (even more are quite possible) and can sit on the shelf and remain fresh for several months, possibly up to a year.’14 The penny dropped. It was not for our convenience – no consumer in their right mind wants food in their refrigerator for a year – but for the back-of-store convenience of retailers. Plastic packaging was being applied with increasing zeal because it was cost-effective and made life easier for retailers and manufacturers, who neatly argued that it was ultimately in our interest because the packaging resulted in lower food prices overall.
This may well be true in part, but we were, nevertheless, left to deal with the consequences: 90 per cent of the cost of collection, sorting and disposal of plastic packaging is borne by us, the householder, through our taxes. Meanwhile the burden on the environment is incalculable. Key to turning the tide of this waste, and one of our missions through writing this book, is to level that playing field.
Our plastic problem had become entrenched, and extremely complicated. Unwrapping and shedding the plastic meant feeding into a complex, patchy waste infrastructure with a multitude of recycling systems and bins and boxes which confused almost every householder I met.
But believe it or not, there was also a lot of effort being expended on solving some of these problems. In the UK the government set up special advisory panels and organised innumerable conferences on minimising waste and designing better plastic consumables. There was a huge amount of energy from 2005 to 2009 as part of a voluntary initiative called the Courtauld Commitment. This was a series of agreements between leading grocery retailers and manufacturers, WRAP (the Waste Resources Action Plan) and the four UK administrations – including the Scottish Government. Now when I look back these were halcyon days. The focus was on new solutions and technologies that would reduce the amount of packaging of all materials getting into our bins – but of course the focus became plastic. This was a voluntary agreement, but nevertheless the results were impressive. According to the official statistics, over this four-year period 1.2 million tonnes of food and packaging waste was prevented, a saving of 3.3 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, which is equivalent to the emissions from 500,000 round-the-world flights.
WRAP was launched in 2000, and has continued to play an important role in pushing our country from the bottom of the international recycling tables (where it once languished) upwards. In 1996, we were at the bottom of the European recycling league table, alongside Ireland and Greece. We recycled a minuscule 7.5 per cent of our rubbish. But the good thing about being at the bottom is that the only way is up, and that’s the way we went. Statutory targets were set in 2000, obliging councils to offer recycling. Then the Household Waste Recycling Act became law in 2003, requiring every household to be provided with a doorstep recycling collection for at least two materials by 2010. In 2005 there was even a £10 million national TV advertising campaign to make us get into the habit of recycling.
By 2007, we were each recycling 171 kg of rubbish a year, securing mid-level status in the league table.15 Then, wouldn’t you know it, the wheels started to come off. By 2008, when the global recession impacted, I reported that the bottom had dropped out of the recyclable materials market. Stockpiles became commonplace as councils struggled to shift materials, and some had to be housed on Ministry of Defence bases until manufacturing picked up. Eventually it did, and the threat receded.
WRAP also brought the major food retailers who dominate our grocery landscape to the table, and they promised to make lowering plastic consumption a big priority. I had confidence that they’d make it easier for us to do a food shop one day that was pretty much unpackaged.
I might have saved my energy. If I have a criticism of this period, it’s that I gained a lot of insight and then gave up too easily. Those of us who were pushing for better recycling, smarter design of everyday items and less single-use plastic – and there were many of us – ceded too much control to the retail, manufacturing and plastic industries. They in turn came up with a typically complex system of levies that meant the biggest producers of the plastics that enter our bins – the big manufacturers and household brands churning out billions of bottles, tubs and trays a year – do not pay the true cost of production, impact, collection and recycling of those products. Nor do they pay a penalty if the plastic they inflict on the world is not recycled.
HEARTS AND MINDS
I began to realise that for many people, plastic pollution is an extremely emotional issue. It affects them in a way that climate change doesn’t always (the challenge of communicating the danger of an atmospheric gas that you can’t smell and aren’t aware of was always going to be a tough call). I was moved to tears watching a Sky News special. A man in his sixties showed a reporter the plastic that had washed up on a beach in the West of Scotland. He had lived there all his life, and matter-of-factly pointed out the typical dystopian hillock of water bottles, tampon applicators and crisp bags tangled up with seaweed on the shoreline. He pronounced it ‘a disgrace’. Then he began to cry and I found myself crying, too.
We weren’t crying for ourselves, but for our grandkids, or someone else’s grandkids. I don’t have children myself, but as an environmentalist I get the opportunity to fight for yours. Ultimately we’re all headed in the same direction. We’re all trying to avoid crushing, abject failure. And, if you’re looking for the definition of human failure, it is surely bequeathing to future generations a planet trashed beyond repair. It would add insult to injury if that should occur through making bad choices about stuff like plastic food wrappings. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
How would we suffer the indignity of explaining to others that we allowed ourselves to be convinced that there was no harm in making single-use items like ketchup sachets and drinking straws out of plastic, a material that would last and pollute for centuries?