Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to do some incredibly cool things. I’ve seen atolls teeming with whale sharks, sailed on the iconic Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, and lived with an indigenous community in the far reaches of the Brazilian rainforest biome on the border with Venezuela. But the only time my friends have truly seethed with jealousy is when I met Sir David Attenborough.
For our first meeting I rang Sir Attenborough’s ‘office’ to arrange an interview, and to my immense surprise he answered the phone, his inimitable authoritative whisper catching me completely off guard. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘would next Tuesday suit?’ I was, of course, reduced to a gibbering wreck. On that occasion, the thing I remember most was his talking me through the fossil collection housed in his living room. He’s been collecting fossils since he was a young boy, and that sense of wonder was still very much intact.
Attenborough’s seminal BBC series The Living Planet was broadcast when I was at primary school. To people of my vintage, it was like a form of magic. Glued to our screens, we sat transfixed, with Attenborough as our guide, in awe of the world’s biggest trees and learning about the rain cycle, or witnessing birds with incredible plumage and meeting indigenous communities who lived in nature. It certainly didn’t mirror the suburbia I was used to, but that voice somehow made it very immediate. I began to understand that all of it was interconnected and functioned together. The ‘living planet’ was an ecosystem, and it was my home.
In October 2017 an audience of fourteen million watched the BBC series Blue Planet II. That huge audience was confronted by the reality of plastic’s grip on us, and our addiction to it. The famous underwater cinematography showed us a pilot whale with a bucket in its mouth, an albatross feeding plastic to its chicks and a dolphin potentially exposing its newborn calves to tiny pieces of plastic pollution. The potent images were accompanied by David Attenborough’s powerful rallying cry to protect our oceans.
Something shifted. The stuff you might have seen out of the corner of your eye – the plastic bags caught in the branches of winter trees, the bottles and containers, flip-flops and fishing net tangled in the seaweed in the bay where you take your summer holiday – took on real meaning. Both our connection to this mess and our culpability for the impact on these sea creatures were laid bare. The plastic pandemic was brought to life. Our home was being trashed.
While we might balk at anybody else telling us what to do, or suggesting that it’s time we stepped up, when David said it the nation jumped to attention.
Making Blue Planet II was a mammoth operation. Crews were despatched on 129 expeditions to thirty-nine countries.19 They did not set out to make a big deal of plastic pollution. In fact, as Executive Producer James Honeyborne explained in the aftermath in April 2018, the impact of the show, while thrilling, put them in uncharted territory. ‘Our job is to tell stories about incredible marine life, and that’s what we set out to do, to help people feel connected to life beneath the waves, but when the crews went out [. . .] they would find plastic everywhere they looked. So it became part of the story, we couldn’t ignore it. If we were going to give a contemporary portrait of the world’s oceans, we’d have to include plastic.’
He added, ‘It’s very strange for us [as natural history film-makers] to see the reaction the series has had at a political level because it’s not that we went out to make a campaigning film. We’re not campaigners. In fact, we’re there to tell people how wonderful sea life is.’20
The ubiquity of plastic in the environment and our everyday connection to it means that we cannot ignore it. It is in your face. Plastic is taking over our planet. In the natural world plastic has now encroached on every biome. It doesn’t so much interact with the environment as disrupt and disfigure it, and much of the damage could be permanent. It’s an issue that moves us quickly from awareness to activism. It lends itself to individual action, too.
Blue Planet II put the issue front and centre, and suddenly we were all talking about one thing: plastic pollution. After the shock and dismay came incomprehension. How was so much of our plastic waste ending up in the sea? After all, many of us had become dedicated and assiduous recyclers.
REAPPRAISAL
To me, it felt as if a starting pistol had been fired. There was a clamour for solutions and remedies. There was a great wave of energy as people tried to expunge plastics from their life: from the high street, from their cars, from their caravans – you name it. Hundreds of people got in touch with me on BBC Television’s The One Show, on which I am a reporter and presenter. Following that episode of Blue Planet II, we were, I suppose, the natural focus for viewers’ questions and suggestions, and they contacted us in waves. Before long our coverage of the topic evolved into a weekly segment on turning the plastic tide. Accepting that many plastics can’t be avoided, and indeed are necessary, on the show we took aim at avoidable single-use plastics.
On one early show, Gordon Ramsay was our star guest. When I began haranguing him about banning single-use plastic straws in his restaurants, he viewed me with some amusement, before pronouncing that I was worse than his mother. It was a good-natured exchange, but I meant it. It was time for the big brands and the famous names to show leadership in our crusade against plastic waste. Some months later Gordon Ramsay Associates confirmed to the show that they were swapping to biodegradable straws.
It’s always a win when one of us takes a stand by renouncing single-use plastics – but when it’s a well-known celebrity with millions of young fans on social media, it’s a double bonus. I was delighted, for example, to find that the singer and producer, Ellie Goulding, uses a metal beaker and paper straw on stage. Small changes, yes, but another victory nonetheless.
Through a ‘green’ friend, I got to meet Ellie, who is by her own admission ‘on one’ about single-use plastic and environmental concerns generally. She is a UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Environment, and in December 2017 we attended the third UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya together. We visited a turtle sanctuary at the protected Watamu Beach on the Indian Ocean. It was an extraordinary experience as the marine biologist introduced us to the patients – two hawksbill turtles lucky enough to be picked up by fishermen who dropped them at the animal hospital. It was a typical story for the guys there: the turtle’s guts get blocked with plastic and they are unable to feed, slowly dying. Death by trash. Once the larger of the two turtles was treated and the plastic successfully removed, I helped to release him back into the water, his flippers slapping against our legs as we went. He was strong, and back to full turtle health, but for how long? And what happens next time? As we released him into the surf, he passed a floating flip-flop as he propelled himself into the ocean. Incoming plastic; outgoing turtle. (Neither was the coincidence lost on me that this was the exact species granted a reprieve by Parkes’ original invention of plastic back in Hackney.)
The next day Ellie, her manager Hannah and I took a stroll along the coastline. As we walked and talked, what started as casually and unthinkingly bending down to pick up a washed-up water bottle, turned into an epic beach clean with us staggering along the shore, laden down with bottles and snack packets and any number of bits of sandy plastic, including the tough plastic silver-grey envelopes that you’ll know from online deliveries and a great number of old instant noodle packets. The origins were impossible to decipher; we could only guess at them. Some of it would have come from the shore, where there’s a lack of infrastructure for rubbish disposal.
Back on the beach, our guest-house owner took the rubbish we arrived home with in good grace and promised to deal with it. They were sad but not surprised. Beach pollution is a fact of life here, on this beautiful natural coastline, and needs to be plucked from the long grasses that frame the sand. We passed several women out for their morning stroll in designer beachwear, dragging hessian sacks and filling them with plastic. The sack of rubbish has become this season’s accessory by necessity. Certainly, we vowed that next time we visited, we’d come equipped.
REAPPRAISAL
I returned home to find that some changes were suddenly afoot. The outcry on social media and in the press in the wake of Blue Planet II had translated into something more meaningful. In early January 2018, the British Prime Minister Theresa May launched the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan (the first time since 2003 that a British Prime Minister had laid out an environmental strategy in the House of Commons). ‘A Green Future: Our 25 Year Plan to Improve the Environment’ included a vow to eradicate all avoidable plastic waste over the next twenty-five years. Blue Planet II was cited specifically as one of the reasons for that pledge.
Days later, on 16 January, frozen-food retailer Iceland announced that it would eliminate plastic packaging for all its products – across 1,400 product lines – within five years to help end the scourge of plastic pollution. I was elated. The industry seemed less impressed, and the British Plastics Federation responded in the vein of Scrooge attending the office party: ‘Growing and transporting food consumes a lot more energy than that used to make the packaging protecting it. Iceland’s proposals target products that will have absolutely no impact on reducing marine litter, which in the UK typically comes from items littered outside our homes.’21 Ouch, I thought.
Iceland was not at all deterred. When I visited their headquarters near Chester, MD Richard Walker confidently showed me the paper and pulp trays and paper bags he believes will take his brand’s products to plastic-free status by 2023. In practice I found that Iceland’s plastic-free packaging is already hitting the shelves. ‘Not nearly enough plastic is currently captured by recycling in the UK, and until this year we were largely exporting the problem,’ Richard Walker explained.
He is clear that he is in a position to shift his production to face off a crisis because Iceland remains a private, family-owned company. Other big retailers are answerable to shareholders, who are not apparently as stirred by the plastic pandemic. ‘We’re turning off the tap,’ he said. ‘It’s the only way to get to grips with this.’ A surfer with small kids, Walker is driven towards change. ‘Otherwise what’s the point?’ he asks me. The noise that Iceland’s Richard Walker has been making on plastic has only served to highlight the deafening silence of the other big retailers.
As energy and noise and announcements continued to swirl around the subject of plastic, how did this translate into real domestic family life? I wanted to see for myself, so I rang to ask the Proud family in South Manchester if they’d let me and a film crew go through their bins. They very kindly agreed.
The Proud family consists of mum Louise, who runs her own hairdressing business, dad Wayne, a design manager for a large building and architectural firm, their daughters Macey and Amber, and Ruby, a small, cute dog that can simultaneously growl and let you stroke her, and a tortoise. The Prouds built the extension on their house with their own fair hands. Now it resembles an upscale Ibiza interior, all white walls and opening out into a barbecue area, but in the depths of winter it was a story of mud and struggle. I note this by way of an insight into their character: the Proud family is not easily deterred. And yet when we set the challenge of reducing their plastic waste, it was tough going. They achieved a lot in a small amount of time, cutting their plastic use by 30 to 40 per cent in the first week. On the downside, they struggled to balance costs, and in seeking out plastic-free, their essential shopping became more expensive.
We made several films with the Prouds for The One Show. I loved having the opportunity to sit around their kitchen table and talk rubbish (!). It was not only a great insight, seeing the challenge through the Prouds’ eyes, it was an essential piece in the jigsaw, showing how individual households can fight the tide of plastic.
The family have become avid plastic-reducers and were already avid recyclers, but when we followed the family’s recycling to their local Materials Recovery Facility (MRF, pronounced ‘murf’ like ‘Smurf’) we found that a high proportion of recycling was not being turned into useful new items (as they’d assumed), but were being burned in energy recovery facilities. We were also able to take the family’s concerns directly to the policymakers, the plastic manufacturers, the polymeric scientists and the campaigners and big recyclers, all of whom appeared on The One Show’s distinctive bright green sofas. It’s not always easy to get joined-up answers on this topic, but we were determined to try.
After six months I was such a stalwart at the recycling centres, which included MRFs and even a PRF (Plastic Recovery Facility, pronounced ‘purf’) that in Skelmersdale they joked I could run it without them, and in Longley Lane in Manchester I was solemnly handed a business card with a drawing of a rat on it. This, I was reliably informed, was to be handed to my GP in the event that I became unwell, and explained some of the gruesome particulars of Leptospirosis, aka Weil’s disease. It was a solemn reminder that rats are an occupational hazard of the waste business (I’m particularly phobic) and that this industry is gritty and real and not very glamorous, even for those of us who dip in and out for TV reports. But even so, we needed to get to grips with it.
THE DEEP DIVE ON RECYCLING
There’s a persuasive line on recycling when it comes to the flow of plastic into our lives. Unsurprisingly, I hear it used by the plastic industry but also by retailers and politicians: ‘Don’t worry,’ they chorus, ‘we will just get better at recycling.’ This silver bullet approach would be all well and good, if only it was that easy.
I love recycling, and I’ve always taken my own household recycling seriously. The process of altering the molecules in waste materials so that they can become something else seems magical to me. Energy is transferred from one matter to another in a continuous loop, and is therefore harnessed. That means that precious resources and the environment are conserved. When recycling works, it really works. Recycling plastic, for example, minimises energy and resource use by avoiding the extraction and processing of virgin oil, and it also reduces CO2, particulate matter and other harmful gas emissions, compared to other methods of disposal or recovery. It also diverts our rubbish from landfill, and this is really important.
But in the UK, as we have seen, confusion still reigns when it comes to the question of what really happens to the waste that, each week, we dutifully collect and deposit in recycling crates and waste bins outside our home, ready for the bin man. It’s a fascinating and complex story, but I won’t go into the entire history of the UK waste industry here – I don’t want to lose you just yet. I will, however, give you the highlights, as these shed some light on the how-what-where we are today vis-à-vis our rubbish.
As a former mining nation, disused tin, China clay and coal pits are dotted across the island. Historically these empty pits made an ideal place to pour in our rubbish. Landfill was convenient and cheap, so we literally buried our waste and the true cost of the issue with it. The fact that we could shovel our rubbish into gigantic holes meant that there was little incentive to find alternative means of waste management, and to some extent enabled us to turn a blind eye to ever more profligate levels of consumption.
Necessity is famously the mother of invention, and by the end of the millennium, as we filled up more big holes, it became pretty clear that we were running out of space. It was also glaringly obvious that mixing hazardous, toxic materials with general rubbish in landfill had potentially lethal consequences, including noxious juices leaching into the environment. Waste entrepreneurs and experts were also cottoning on to the fact that much of the stuff being poured into this disgusting sludge was recyclable, and that by burying it in this way, we were losing its value.
In 1996 a new regulation was introduced to try to deter us from shovelling our waste into holes and move us towards recycling. This arrived in the form of a Landfill Tax – the original cost was £7 per tonne of general waste, with a lower rate of tax on ‘inactive’ waste such as stone, concrete and ceramics. Every year, the tax would be raised as we weaned ourselves off big holes in the ground and were encouraged to recycle.
Even if the will was there, however, the sustainable alternatives to landfill were not in place: there weren’t enough recycling facilities, and there was a lack of information and education. We were dubbed the Dirty Man of Europe, a reputation which has taken a long time to shake off.22
Today, the landfill tax in England has risen to £88.95 per tonne of general waste, and against all the odds, we have got much better at recycling. When the figures for 2015 were released last year – it takes a while to aggregate them – the UK tied with Italy for tenth place, or mid-table in the European league, so not spectacular by any stretch, but no longer in Dirty Man territory.
As recycling has progressed, so has the technology. in the UK, we now have around a hundred MRFs, in the form of giant sheds into which flows all our mixed solid waste. Once inside the MRF, the priority is to sort repeatedly all the glass, metal, paper and plastic into what is useful and recyclable and what is not, as quickly and efficiently as possible. The MRFs are full of high-tech equipment, but human hands are still the traditional first port of call. When it comes to plastics, to the untrained eye the different resins can look very similar, but not to the pickers who snatch and separate the prized clear plastic bottles from the less-prized plastics – the cloudy bottles and flimsy yoghurt tubs – in what feels like nanoseconds. Even so, the number of actual people working in recycling is in decline, as the big waste operators make the switch to Artificial Intelligence (AI) robotic sorting.
How often do we stand at the bin, completely flummoxed by a piece of packaging? Can it be recycled or not? I know that in my house, it’s a regular conundrum. Plastics are slippery. A piece of packaging might look like an easily recyclable foil, but in reality it’s bonded with extruded polyethylene. It might look silky, like a fabric derived from a natural fibre – like teabags, which indeed were originally pieces of cotton muslin fabric – but in fact are made with polypropolene. At the MRF this confusion about what is recyclable is laid bare, and the plastics that are too hard and too costly to separate and process are also removed. Many of the containers and packaging that enter the MRF have very low recycling rates: according to WRAP, only 10 to 15 per cent of mixed plastics are recycled, including the rigid packaging used for supermarket meat and fish.23
Many MRFs have already invested in sophisticated sorting equipment. Ballistic separators bounce and vibrate waste along a belt, with the heavy plastics made from different resins falling down between grate bars onto another belt below, where they are channelled into another waste stream. During the process, pumped air separates lightweight plastics from the heavier glass and metals.
Once captured, many facilities employ near-infrared technology to sort plastics into different types. An infrared beam is fired into the piece of rubbish and can effectively ‘see’ what kind of resin the item is made from. This is clever stuff, and it’s how plastic milk cartons can be picked out from PET plastic bottles (unfortunately this doesn’t work with black plastic, which isn’t picked up in the processing). The whole system is focused on sorting and resorting until only select, ‘target’ materials are left.
It’s fast, with a typical modern facility processing between twenty and twenty-five tonnes of rubbish per hour along one or two different processing lines. It’s also relentless; MRFs operate twenty hours a day, fifty weeks of the year at 90 per cent capacity, clocking up some 5,400 hours per annum.
This brings us to the first problem. Although the number of MRFs has soared over the last five to ten years, they cannot keep pace with the amount of rubbish that we now produce, particularly when it comes to plastic.
While it’s ostensibly great news that we all want to recycle more plastic, the truth is that we don’t have the capacity to process it. In the UK, PRFs remain rare: while we get through five million tonnes of plastic packaging a year in the UK, according to industry insiders, we only have the capacity to recycle 350,000 tonnes a year – only 7 per cent of what we use.
It would be easy to ask why we don’t just build lots more fancy MRFs and PRFs, but at around £6 million a pop, many are owned and run by the waste giants, like Viridor and Veolia. Some are co-owned by local authorities under public finance agreements. These are, I’m afraid, not always the happiest of circumstances. The council just wants our bins emptied and to keep residents happy by recycling. But the waste giants must generate profit to keep their shareholders happy, and this can be tough when the price of recyclate is low. Recyclate is sold on to the global market, and this is extremely competitive. Plastic flake and pellets (which is what successfully recycled plastic eventually becomes) are in price competition with virgin oil: when the oil price drops, recycled plastic loses out because it becomes much cheaper to make new plastic from oil.
Recyclers know they have more chance of selling high-grade, clean plastics that can be sorted and processed quickly (time is definitely money in this business), and so they prioritise plastics that fit the bill as ‘target material’. Often the ‘target material’ is clear PET – the plastic that water bottles are made from. Not only is it high-grade material, but it also is relatively uncomplicated to wash, sort and process into flakes of plastic (that remind me of soap flakes). When sold into international markets they are predominantly used to make polyester for clothing, and other food packaging.
As consumers, eager to do the right thing and buying bottles made from other bottles, there is not enough of what we call ‘closed-loop’ recycling. In closed-loop recycling, an old material is processed and returned to the same ‘as new’ state to be made into a product of the same original material. For example, if you were to unravel a jumper, wash the wool, then use it to knit an entirely new cardigan, you would be following the closed-loop model. For plastic, a bottle turning into a new bottle is the obvious example: PET plastic in water bottles can be broken down into recyclate flakes, through mechanical recycling, and used to make brand-new drinks bottles. I think of this as peer-to-peer recycling, so an item that is made of material from an item of equal value.
Most of our recycling infrastructure, however, fails to hit these dizzy heights, and settles instead for open-loop recycling. Here the PET plastic bottle, for example, is processed to form recyclate flakes, which are then used in fibre manufacturing. In other words, new material from old recycled waste. This is not as ambitious as I would like.
This might sound a peculiar distinction, after all, what does it matter what the recycled plastic flakes get turned into? But it does matter, because it’s only then, in closed-loop recycling, that the recycled material holds its value and can be recycled time and time again. What we do a lot of at the moment is ‘downcycling’, so recovering and reprocessing material and sending it further down the recycling stream. At the moment our PET water bottles might be recycled into food packaging or polyester for clothing, both of which have low recovery rates and are less likely to be recycled next time around. In some parts of the country we’ve also begun to put plastic waste from agriculture – used to cover plants and sileage – into our roads. While this is better than pouring it into landfill, to me it’s still a waste. We’re not recovering anywhere near the value of the oil and energy that was used to make that plastic in the first place.
The target plastics might be what the recyclers really want, but they’re not the only materials we are putting in our bins in the hope that they will be recycled. There are certain groups of plastic that don’t rate well on the global recycling market, or that are technically difficult to reprocess. We have a particular problem with tubs, trays and pots. So while we might dutifully clean them and put them in the right bin on the right day, it is not 100 per cent certain that they will be recycled. What on earth happens to plastics that are technically recyclable, but not financially worth the effort?
Over the last decade, we’ve developed a side dependency on next-generation incineration, known by the industry as Energy from Waste plants (also known as waste-to-energy). These continue to be big news: recently waste giant Viridor announced that it was spending £1.2 billion on more incineration plants. Here the waste deemed ‘non-recyclable’ is burned to produce superheated steam, which drives a high-pressure turbine to power an electric generator. The power created is used to run the plant and the surplus is sold to the National Grid. In the period from January to April 2018, Viridor claimed it sent enough energy to the National Grid to power 330,000 homes or a city the size of Leeds for a year – the equivalent of 225 MW of electricity.
Waste-to-energy incineration has undergone what they might call in marketing a ‘brand refresh’. With a legislation change in 2008, incineration was bumped up in the waste hierarchy; it would no longer be considered a means of disposal, useful for tackling ‘residual’ waste for which landfill was the only alternative, but plants could now be described as ‘recovery’ facilities. That may sound like a purely technical change, but it allowed this industry to cross the rubicon from the problem side of the picture, along with landfill, to the solutions phase, standing alongside recycling. Many communities are not so convinced. There is still unease about living next door to large incineration plants that burn plastic. There is also the issue of sustainability: once the plastic is burned, it is lost as a resource, and that is a waste.
Waste-to-energy incinerators are demanding beasts. They are an expensive investment and they need to be fed with rubbish – and that locks us into using them for the foreseeable future. This is the crux of the anxiety for a lot of environmental campaigners, including Friends of the Earth. Since its inception in 1971, Friends of the Earth has worked on waste and resources and has always taken a dim view of incineration because the process releases emissions into the environment. Based especially on CO2 emissions, Friends of the Earth has long considered waste-to-energy plants to be ‘climate damaging’ technology, even the new operations. But concern also centres on the potential prioritising of incineration over recycling. It comes down to a simple choice: do we feed incinerators, or do we think smarter? As we shift our whole waste economy and start to view our plastic empties as a true resource that can be continuously recycled – something we need to do – will our investment in energy from waste plants mean that we will not have the incentive to capitalise on newer, smarter thinking?
Currently, however, we’re a long way from that ideal future. Our UK recycling services are under intense pressure, and even the Energy from Waste plants wish that there was less plastic flowing into the system. There are simply not enough hours in the day to collect, sort and burn it all. And if things weren’t already pressurised enough, in 2017 along came the biggest jolt to recycling in the UK that we have ever experienced; interestingly, from China.
In July 2017, the Chinese government announced a clampdown on ‘foreign garbage’. To get slightly more technical, that meant bringing in tight contamination limits on twenty categories of scrap, especially waste paper and plastic. This should have rung alarm bells for us in the UK, because between 2012 and January 2018, when the limits were enforced, we shipped more than 2.7 million tonnes of plastic scrap to mainland China and Hong Kong.24 In short, we used China as a giant bin for plastic waste. China was our main market, and most of the plastic waste that we generated was on its way there.
Strangely, despite this dependency and the looming embargo, we put the China problem to the back of our mind. Perhaps we thought that the Chinese authorities wouldn’t go through with it. But they did. While we export our pollution from Europe, what we often tend to forget is that one day other countries will feel the same way about pollution as we do. Fast-forward to January 2018, and it became clear that the Chinese authorities meant business: China’s new drive towards reducing pollution meant that it really was kicking the dirtiest recycling out. All but the cleanest bottles and other materials would be accepted, the rest would be refused entry. The ban was enforced just in time to deal with the aftermath of our biggest plastic and waste hotspot: Christmas. In December 2017, I advised readers of my eco column to recycle really carefully and to visit their household waste centres early.
In practice, you may have noticed very little difference. But look carefully, and you’ll find more and more local authorities beginning to get quite fussy about what items they will take. Behind the scenes experts tell me that councils are being forced to stockpile waste plastics while they urgently look for new markets that are not so fussy about the quality of their waste imports. Those markets are likely to include Sri Lanka and Vietnam, where there is a huge lack of recycling infrastructure.
Last year I went to Sri Lanka, and saw for myself the rubbish dumps rising up around the network of rivers near Galle, on the West Coast. These waterways teem with wildlife: on an early-morning birdwatching trip I had seen two eagles and four different types of kingfisher within the first few minutes. But for how much longer? The informal landfills are leaching toxins into the waterways. Then there’s the cost to human life. Reports came through from Colombo during my trip that a 90 m mountain of waste had collapsed killing twenty-three people.25 An Australian tourist I got chatting to said he enjoyed the country but wouldn’t return; ‘Too much plastic litter,’ he stated matter-of-factly. As he spoke he gesticulated at the offending plastic litter, using his bottle of water as a pointer, oblivious to the fact it would probably soon be joining its brethren.
Back in the UK, there’s more bad news, I’m afraid. We fought so hard to claw our way up the recycling league tables, but we may soon find ourselves slipping back down. The truth is that, when it comes to plastic, behind the scenes our national ambitions have been quietly downgraded. This is to do with cost and the intense and unrelenting lobbying by industry, manufacturers and, unfortunately, retailers. It is also to do with the difficulty of recycling plastics. Until 2016 the UK had a statutory plastic packaging recycling target of 57 per cent by 2017. Without our knowledge, that target has been reduced and our ambitions scaled down to 49 per cent for 2016.
We find ourselves in a truly peculiar situation: we’re sending more plastic than ever to be recycled, but as standards are slipping (except in Wales), less is actually being recycled. In England recycling rates were down 0.7 per cent in the last year to 43 percent. We will now struggle to make a target of 57 per cent recycled waste by 2020. This target used to look achievable.
There are a variety of factors at work here, not least that cash-strapped local authorities have little money to spend on waste. Meanwhile those manufacturers and retailers who gain most by pushing plastic into our lives are getting away with taking little responsibility. Because it is me and you, through our taxes, who fund 90 per cent of the collecting, sorting and disposal or recycling of most of the plastic waste that flows into the country, while the manufacturers, brands and retailers pick up the tab for just 10 per cent. This is another complex system that needs to be reconfigured. At the moment retailers and manufacturers offset part of the packaging they push out into the world by belonging to a compliance scheme. Not only is this unfair, but it has also come to light that this was leading many businesses to overstate how much plastic packaging they actually recycled.
According to the official statistics, during 2016 our nation produced 2.26 million tonnes of plastic packaging and recycled nearly 45 per cent of that, which doesn’t sound too bad.26 But according to waste and recycling expert Dr Dominic Hogg, who has investigated the real pattern of plastic recycling in the UK to produce a report for research company Eunomia, ‘No one believes these figures.’27 Oh dear.
So our humble recycling ends up in a complex system involving the price of crude oil, market forces and political personalities. Honestly, if Macbeth’s witches had got together to create a system that would cause maximum bother, I don’t think they could have magicked up anything more pernicious than this alliance of factors. Double, double toil and trouble.
But while this seems like a giant mess, could there be an upside? When recycling plastic works, it’s brilliant. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, as it is sorted and cleaned in giant washing machines where the labels unstick and we’re left with clear plastic that can be ground into clean lentils and flakes as good as new. There is a lot of opportunity here. If we can’t dump our rubbish on China, could we finally be forced to confront the reality of our own waste habits? Can we now convert our guilt response triggered by Blue Planet II by taking a zero-tolerance stance on the plastic packaging problem that likely caused the whale to die in the first place? Can the plastic, manufacturing and retail industries own up to their mistakes and contribute more to the cost of the infrastructure they rely on? Could this be the point at which we demand more from our recycling while also using less?
A GIANT HEAP CAUSES A STIR
Fast-forward to early April 2018, and we were about to stage a major stunt that would reinforce the critical need for action. The Big Spring Beach Clean is a perennial fixture in the fight against waste. Run by the brilliant NGO Surfers Against Sewage, based in tiny St Agnes, in Cornwall, a network of pivotal beach cleans takes place every year around Easter. The Big Beach Cleans are epic battle sites of plastic-picking heroism on the part of the thousands who take part trying to repair the damage to the UK’s 2,500-plus beaches. They are particularly important in giving our beaches a fighting chance approaching the summer season, when the volume of ‘fugitive’ plastic spikes, stemming from local sources such as takeaways, who dispense single-use ‘disposable’ items like coffee stirrers, sauce sachets, the dreaded plastic straw and our old friend the coffee cup. The Big Spring Beach Clean is a chance to get as much plastic as possible off the beach and to deal with it to make sure it doesn’t enter, or re-enter, the marine environment. Participants collect an incredible amount: in 2017 the Big Spring Beach Clean netted 97 tonnes of plastic waste – a drop in the ocean, yes, but a significant reprieve for the local environment.
After the 2018 Big Spring Beach Clean, a proportion of that waste – 8.7 tonnes – had an extra stop-off point on its way to being sorted, recycled or incinerated. That 8.7 tonnes of plastic waste, which, 24 hours before had been collected by hand by 1,200 volunteers from 52 beaches across the UK (we wanted a representative sample), was dumped at my office – that is, right in front of BBC Broadcasting House in the heart of London’s bustling West End. Our design team, wearing hazmat suits, descended on it and before long, the mound of waste was artfully arranged into an outdoor studio.
That evening, stunned viewers tuned into The One Show to see a dystopian scene. It was an extraordinary sight. Our entire studio had been rebuilt outside in front of the BBC from the 8.7-tonne waste heap, representing just one millionth of the plastic that enters our seas globally every year. As the cameras swooped around the set, viewers saw some of the spoils from the Big Spring Beach Clean, but they didn’t get the powerful stench. It came in waves, a nauseating smell, common to landfill. I wondered if we’d be fired.
And then we were on air. ‘On tonight’s One Show we have just one thing on our minds: plastic. What more could be done to turn the tide on single-use plastic?’ We dedicated our whole show to it, debating plastic with the environment secretary Michael Gove and the Spring Watch star and natural history presenter Chris Packham. I’m not sure that a prime-time show has been dedicated to an environmental issue in that way before, and despite the olfactory discomfort, it felt great to be part of it.
After filming ended, I had a quiet moment on the set looking at my rubbish. The team sent by recycling company Viridor were beginning to cart it away. I was soon to follow, taking part of the rubbish to Rochester and then on to Skelmersdale, where as much as humanly possible would be turned into clean flakes of PET (the most common sort of plastic, used in water bottles) ready to make new stuff. It was a lot to process, both emotionally and from a recycling point of view, and I felt a strange elation that the issue we had been campaigning and making films about for so many years was suddenly at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Plastic from the ocean was laid out before my eyes. But why on earth was it there in the first place? And what, or who, was to blame?
Plastic number symbol & Abbr. | Name of plastic | Common domestic use | UK recycling information |
| Polyethylene terephthalate | Clear drinks bottles, oil bottles, food packaging and punnets, textiles (e.g. polyester). | PET drinks bottles are collected by most (92%) council waste-collection schemes. Recycled into fabrics and fleece, carpets, straps. Also can be recycled into new bottles in Closed-Loop systems, and other food packaging. |
| High-density polyethylene | Milk containers, cleaning, laundry and detergent bottles, shampoo bottles. (You can remember HDPE is the milk container plastic, because, coincidentally, it has a slightly milky look, as is opaque rather than clear). | Collected by most (92%) councils. Recycled into recycling containers and bins, garden furniture, pipes, pens. New technology allows HDPE to be recycled for new milk bottles. |
| Polyvinyl chloride | Detergent bottles, squash bottles, window frames, drainage pipes, shower curtains, clothing, toys, clear food packaging. | Not generally collected in household recycling. Can be hazardous for recycling centres to deal with. |
| Low-density polyethylene | Dry-cleaning and carrier bags, bread bags, squeezy bottles and containers, yokes for six-pack beers, linings and laminated cardboards. | Not generally collected in household recycling. Plastic carrier bags are collected by some supermarkets for recycling into new carrier bags or bin bags. Mixed plastic recycling is hoped to be in place within five years. |
| Polypropylene | Margarine tubs, soup pots, most bottle tops, waterproofing in clothes, straws, medicine bottles. | Not generally collected in household recycling in spite of potential – for recycled plastics for bins, pallets, trays etc. Again, mixed plastic recycling is hoped to be in place within five years. |
| Polystyrene | Most yoghurt pots, meat trays, takeaway cups, disposable plates, takeaway containers, compact disc holders, cushioning in packaging. | Not generally collected in household recycling. Some commercial polystyrene may be recycled however for use in foam packing, rulers, carry-out containers. |
| Usually indicates that item is made from a blend of plastics, in any combination of the standard six plus any other resin type. Includes acrylic/perspex, nylon and polycarbonate. Certain food containers. DVDs, sunglasses. |
