FIGHT THEM ON THE BEACHES
The endgame of this giant plastic binge is revealed in all its nightmarish glory on our beaches. ‘Trashed tidelines’ are the evidence of plastic’s ability to travel, endure and fragment. Of the eight million individual pieces of waste that are reckoned to enter the world’s marine environment every day, most are made of plastic. Around 70 per cent of the rubbish sinks to the seabed, 15 per cent drifts upwards in the water column and 15 per cent is deposited on our shores.41 Living in Europe, the world’s largest maritime zone, and as islanders to boot, we can’t avoid the spectre of ocean trash.
In the early 1990s the Marine Conservation Society began to tackle the issue of waste on our UK beaches by organising 121 volunteer ‘beach watches’ across the UK. An advert in a local newspaper for the Easter beach clean at Hart Warren in Cleveland in 1993 promised sewage, plastic and metal debris. So, quite the variety. The 2018 Big Spring Beach Cleans organised by Surfers Against Sewage mobilised 35,500 people across 571 beaches to collect 63 tonnes of plastic waste. It’s an incredible number, but every person was needed. Plastic litter has increased by 140 per cent since 1994, and over the past fifteen years the amount of litter washing up on British beaches has doubled.42 This was borne out by the huge haul at Sennen Cove, where I joined the volunteers to carefully pick plastic strips, microbeads and fragments from between the rocks.
The world’s largest, and longest-running, volunteer beach-clean operation is reckoned to be at Versova beach,43 a oneand-a-half-mile strip of coastline facing the Arabian Sea in western Mumbai. The area, once the centre of a thriving, age-old fishing culture, had become synonymous with plastic waste. In October 2015, local lawyer, activist and ocean lover Afroz Shah decided to start his own beach clean initiative and quickly built an army of fellow volunteers. By March 2018 it was reported that the volunteers had hand-collected an astonishing 13 million kg of plastic rubbish, and at least eighty hatchling turtles of the vulnerable Olive Ridley species were spotted on the beach for the first time in decades.44
Over many years, beach cleaners around the world have painstakingly, quietly and sometimes not so quietly cleaned up and collected evidence of the plastic pandemic. The hauls have been collated and analysed, and the data, with its shocking figures, represents powerful, citizen-led scientific proof in the campaign to stem the tide.
Thanks to beach clean data, we also have a clearer idea of which items are entering the ocean in the greatest numbers. The Ocean Conservancy (which has mobilised over twelve million people on global beach cleans) produces its top finds from beach cleans annually. Seven out of the top ten items listed (in reverse order) are plastic:
• plastic lids
• metal bottle caps
• plastic grocery bags
• glass bottles
• plastic bags (non-grocery)
• straws and stirrers
• plastic bottle caps
• food wrappers (including sweet wrappers)
• plastic drinks bottles
• cigarette butts
The incontrovertible evidence collected through beach cleans is a powerful weapon in the fightback – without it, I doubt we’d be on the brink of change today. Politicians tend to take notice when large groups of people mobilise for a cause. If you haven’t been on a beach clean, what’s stopping you? (see Further Information, details for Surfers Against Sewage who run beach cleans, here).
FOOTPRINTING PLASTIC
We’ve seen which plastic items are the most persistent polluters in the marine environment: now let’s take a closer look at those which are probably invading your own life. Living in Western Europe, in a heavily industrialised society, makes us de facto heavy consumers of every material, not just plastic. We are encouraged to consume, and we’re very good at it. According to parliamentary research, British household consumption remains the ‘main engine of growth for the UK economy’, accounting for 63 per cent of GDP: if we stop consuming, the economy tanks – or at least, that’s what we’re told.45
Now, there are many things I like about being a privileged consumer. I would rather be on this side of the fence than one of the 783 million who live in ‘extreme poverty’, classified by the World Bank as living on below $1.90 a day.46 Being on this side of the fence also affords me a certain amount of power to change things; I can direct my spending towards the services, products and systems that are more just and ecologically balanced, products that display the Fairtrade stamp, for example. But while empowered, I am also acutely conscious that, in the main, it’s the planet that is picking up the real bill for the stuff I enjoy.
Our ecological debt is enormous. Everything we consume depletes the earth’s resources. In the early 1990s Mathis Wackernagel, an engineering student at the University of British Columbia in Canada, decided to account for all the stuff we apparently need to support our lifestyles. This included grazing land for cows for meat and dairy, forests for paper and wood products, water for everything. Then he calculated the resources used in a year by an average individual, and compared this with the earth’s capacity for regeneration, i.e. the resources that the earth can replenish through natural cycles during the year. Wackernagel’s calculations showed that consumers in Western Europe were deeply in the red, burning through resources faster than the earth can replenish. If everyone on the planet were to consume at the rate we do in the UK, we would need three whole planets’ worth of resources to support us.
Wackernagel called his model of accounting ‘ecological footprinting’, and it transformed the thinking on consumption. We are now well used to thinking of our environmental and carbon footprints, even if we don’t do it very often. (Calculate your ecological footprint at footprint.wwf.org.uk.) The annual Earth Overshoot Day is held on the day that statistically we exceed the earth’s capacity to regenerate life-sustaining resources. It’s not exactly cause for celebration; in 2017 it fell on 2 August, and every year it creeps forward by a few days. The goal is to push it back.
YOUR PLASTIC PROFILE
Evidence garnered from the beaches might be frightening and depressing, but it has served to crystallise the problem of how we deal with our rubbish, and to demand that we reappraise our waste and recycling industry to see where the leaks have occurred. It has also spurred us into action and provided a kick up the proverbial to policymakers, institutions and think tanks, inciting them to drill down and release reports on plastic consumption in the UK. This is long overdue, because when it comes to plastic, every day is pretty much Earth Overshoot Day.
I’ve used the latest think tank data to form an approximate plastic profile of the average UK consumer. And although my picture is, by necessity, based on estimates and generalisations, it is instructive – not least because it reveals some disturbing trends in our consumption.
Our plastic footprint in the UK is around 139–140 kg per person, per year.47 That is three times the amount of plastic per person that we consumed in 1980,48 and the equivalent of 11,024, average-weight, empty PET water bottles (at 12.7 g each). Of course, if our personal plastic consumption were entirely to consist of water bottles, it would make things easier – we’re quite good at recycling PET bottles, at least if we get them in the right bin. But our plastic use is much more complicated than that. To drill down into the plastic profile, here are the numbers on a few of the most common household plastics:
Water bottles You will likely plough through 150 plastic water bottles every year. In London, usage rises to 175 plastic water bottles per person, per year.
Cling film This is made from thin, stretchy plastic, polymer plastic #3, which is problematic in recycling. We are a nation of devotees: in the UK we get through 1.2 billion m of cling film every year, enough to wrap the world thirty times.49 Your household’s share is 44 m per year.50
Toothpaste tubes You will each get through a cool (and minty) eight to ten average-size tubes of toothpaste a year – or 21.5 tubes if you are a fan of travel-size packs.51 Most of these are now plastic, and you will struggle to find a council that will accept them for recycling.
DISPOSABLE SINGLE-USE PLASTIC PRODUCTS
The UK ranks fifth in the EU’s single-use plastic consumption chart of shame. The smoking ban, a change in cigarette advertising and education have engineered a big shift: we have fewer smokers, therefore fewer cigarette butts which contain plastic, and this brings down our overall UK total. If it wasn’t for this fact, we’d rank in the top two: we consume more cotton buds and sanitary towels containing plastics than any other European nation, and we’re among the biggest users of straws on the planet. Saved from total disgrace by the cigarette butt; who’d have thought it?
Each year in the UK we get through:52
• Drinks cups and lids 4.1 billion single-use ‘paper’ cups (part plastic; polymer-coated)
• Plastic straws 42 billion per year
• Wet wipes 10.8 billion
• Cotton buds 13.2 billion
• Disposable plastic cutlery 16.5 billion pieces
• Sanitary towels 4.1 billion
OTHER PLASTICS
Packaging The lion’s share of current UK plastic use, packaging accounts for 67 per cent of plastic that is chucked out. Nearly 40 per cent of the plastic we put in our bins could, or should, have been recycled, but as we know, there are limitations on – and confusion among consumers about – our recycling system. The healthy recycling statistics posted by the plastics industry have been called into question. In fact, waste experts at Eunomia, a UK recycling and resource efficiency consultancy, didn’t question as much as trash them. ‘It seems reasonable to state that no one really knows what the real recycling rate for plastic packaging currently is,’ says a recent Eunomia report.53 Ouch. Sadly, you also have to assume that some householders just cannot be bothered.
Toys Out of sixteen of the main types of consumer goods, from food to automobiles, the toy sector is the most plastic-intensive. From every $1 million revenue a toy brand makes, it uses 40 tonnes of plastic.54 If the toy industry had to pay the true environmental cost of producing, collecting and cleaning up plastic, it would go bankrupt. And if you’ve have a busy Christmas with lots of young children at home, your plastic profile will likely balloon.
Agri-plastics This is the film that covers fruit and vegetables, or the containers and bags for fertilisers. Used both behind the scenes and front-of-house in the tobacco and food supply chain, agri-plastics constitute up to 1.9 million tonnes of plastic every year in the EU.
THE PLASTIC DISCLOSURE PROJECT
These figures can only ever be a snapshot and a rough estimation of our likely average plastic consumption. Piecing together our personal plastic footprint serves to highlight a major issue: the lack of transparency from big business and the plastic industry itself. The corporations that rely on plastic can be very shy when it comes to talking numbers. Coca-Cola, for example, to name just one of the big global brands, wasn’t keen to disclose the number of plastic bottles it uses every year, but in 2017 Greenpeace was able to estimate reasonably that it was in the region of an astonishing 110 billion a year.55 The NGO was also able to establish that Coke had increased production by an extra billion bottles over the year.
The global giants must, however, be compelled to come clean. Knowing the figures isn’t just about arbitrarily naming and shaming global brands; it’s about understanding what we do next and creating the platform for action. ‘If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ is the strapline of the Plastic Disclosure Project, established in 2010 by concerned ocean scientists. With the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the Plastic Disclosure Project has repeatedly warned major brands that they must do more to calculate and reveal the amount of plastic they use, and commit to reducing their usage year by year.
As long as people like us keep up the scrutiny, continue to make noise and make it clear that an abundance of plastic is a big issue for us, then more brands will engage with the Plastic Disclosure Project and make public their usage. The world’s corporations know that the alternative to a voluntary initiative like this is tough legislation, including bans on disposable items. In fact, we’re already starting to see this: the UK government recently muted a ban on face wipes (I explain why it’s necessary to wean yourself off the wipe in chapter 13, Rethink, here).
I’m in favour of bans, to a point. The issue with bans is that they tackle one item at a time. And without changing the culture, and our desire to use disposable products, as soon as you’ve tackled one item and removed it off the list of the top ten offenders, the next just moves up and takes its place. As I know from my early interaction with supermarkets on removing plastic packaging at the behest of my readers, when I lobbied them about shrink-wrapped coconuts and secured a victory, only to find myself lobbying for the de-plastification of the cucumber a couple of months later . . . and so it continued. I call it the Coconut Conundrum.
You can get an idea of your basic plastic footprint using a calculator provided by Greenpeace: https://secure.green peace.org.uk/page/content/plastics-calculator. But neither footprint nor profile is as precise as we need. Unlike Wackernagel’s very smart accounting system, I can’t tell you how much plastic affects the planet and what our fair share of that is. All we can say is that the impact is serious and growing. As a society, we must make some crucial decisions about the biosphere. The Paris Climate Agreement, for example, gives us goals and a timeline for cutting our greenhouse gas emissions. We have a chance to avoid catastrophic climate change if we meet those goals on deadline. Similarly we need to make decisions about plastic. We can all pretty much agree that we can’t continue to use it at this volume. So how much will we use, and where? On what terms? And if we decide some plastic is necessary, what would our fair share of plastic look like?
Our UK plastic profile is currently broad-brush and based on estimates: to get a real grip on personal consumption, we need better access to data. In chapter 7, Record, here, I suggest how you can keep a plastic diary to get a truer picture of your plastic consumption and use the information to wean yourself off as much unnecessary plastic as possible.
THE EVERYDAY PLASTIC PROJECT
On a September evening in 2016, Daniel Webb was confronted by plastic waste that had been swept in by a storm, strewn along Margate seafront on the south coast of England. Angered by the sight, Daniel became intrigued by the fate of his discarded household plastic. As a fairly reliable recycler, he had assumed it was being taken care of, but could he be responsible for some of the plastic littering his local beach that day? When he began to investigate the fate of his plastic waste, once the bin men took it away, he found official statistics lacking and data from the recycling companies patchy.
Daniel describes himself as an everyday guy: he was neither a tree hugger, nor previously very interested in plastic, but he was determined. He now wants to know why things are packaged like they are, and to follow it through to the bitter end.
He took drastic action. Beginning on New Year’s Day 2017, he resolved to keep every piece of plastic waste he produced. Anything that contained a polymer was collected and stored – every bottle top, piece of bubble wrap, coffee lid, sliced-bread bag and blunt disposable razor; all the plastic stuff that friends and loved ones left in his home – including his girlfriend’s plastic tampon applicators, and crisp bags that friends left in his bin – every single item throughout the year was collected and bagged. If nobody could give him the data on his consumption and recycling, he would get it himself.
One year, and twenty-two black-bin-bags-bulging-with-plastic-waste later, on New Year’s Day 2018, Daniel finished his experiment. Then he began the unenviable task of sorting, cataloguing, photographing and analysing the plastic that filled his spare room, and working out what it all meant in the general scheme of things. He called it his Everyday Plastic project, and the fascinating haul is now an art installation and Daniel’s photographs have been displayed on billboards at Margate fun park Dreamland; the venue obviously wasn’t deterred by their dystopian nature. In fact, they look rather beautiful. Polypropylene bags that previously contained cheddar cheese and polystyrene yoghurt pots take on a certain aesthetic appeal under his artistic direction.
It has to be said that Daniel is only a moderate consumer of plastic. For instance, despite a heavy crisp habit, he was not much of an on-the-go consumer of food and drink, and was already disciplined in the art of carrying and refilling both a water bottle and reusable coffee cup. Yet he still accumulated in the region of 4,500 separate bits of plastic. That’s eighty-six different plastic items a week. There’s a strong likelihood that many of us will top this.
Altogether, Daniel collected 4,490 items made of plastic. Here’s a snapshot showing what Daniel discovered about his own consumption:
• Ninety-three per cent (by volume rather than weight) of his haul was packaging for food, drink and other products.
• Sixty per cent of the collection was food packaging (this is almost an exact match for official statistics).
• The non-packaging items included a broken keyboard, disposable razors and some mop heads.
Daniel’s accumulated plastic collection includes:
• 639 trays, pots and lids
• 207 bottles/liquid containers
• 284 caps and ring lids
• 450 miscellaneous items. These included a 4 m plastic strip that had been wrapped around a computer.
Some of the individual pieces couldn’t be categorised, as Daniel could no longer remember nor identify their original function. This strikes me as a funny consequence of living with your plastic. Such is the breakneck flow of plastic through our lives, we chuck it out in such a hurry that we don’t stop to analyse how or why we had it in the first place – we’ve thrown it away before we even get a chance to remember what its original purpose may have been. One of the fascinating things about Daniel’s experiment is that by living with the discarded material, he has been forced to confront all of these questions.
The experiment uncovers other interesting facts applicable to each of our plastic lives, and some anomalies too. Over the course of one year, Daniel collected just fifteen single-use plastic water bottles. But despite the fact that Daniel generally carries a reusable, refillable one – like me, he’s a Keepcup fan – fifty-four single-use coffee cups still made it into his inventory. These were the occasions that he forgot his Keepcup.
The Everyday Plastic experiment wasn’t conducted just to show Daniel what he consumed. Early on he brought in earth scientist and researcher Julie Schneider to analyse his collection and to explore the lessons that might be extrapolated for all of us, so that we might make different, better decisions in future.
Daniel and Julie calculated the energy used to make all the plastic in the first place at 612.5 kwh. The same amount of energy could power an average fridge freezer for two and a half years, or boil 5,568 litres of water in an average kettle. They also worked out that 207 items (4.6 per cent of the collection) could easily have been consumed in reusable materials or refused altogether. Sometimes we could ‘just say no’.
By collecting his plastic rubbish, Daniel has provided a treasure trove of data. He should feel a sense of pride, but I know he’s also disappointed by what he found. He assumed, like many of us, that his plastic bottles and tubs would be made into new bottles and tubs. But his experiment showed him that only 1.3 per cent of all the items he collected contained any percentage of recycled plastic.
When he and Julie evaluated the recycling potential of the haul, just 161 out of the 4,490 items could potentially be recycled in the UK: that’s just 4 per cent. By their calculations, 289 (6 per cent) would likely be exported for recycling. Meanwhile, 1,277 items (28 per cent) would be destined for old-fashioned landfill, where it would sit in perpetuity. A further 71 items (2 per cent) would go to ‘secondary recycling’. But by far the biggest chunk, 2,691 items (60 per cent) would be headed for ‘energy recovery’. In other words, they would be incinerated, and a small amount of energy would be recovered for fuel.
Statistically speaking, Daniel and Julie reckoned that fifty of the items, had they been allowed out of the spare room, would have ended up in the sea.56 I can’t get that out of my head. We could each be responsible for fifty plastic items entering the sea this year, unless we change something about the volume of plastics we consume and how we dispose of them. OK, so they cannot be directly linked to us, and we did not go down to the beach to lob them in on purpose, but I know I will go to any lengths to make sure that my allocation doesn’t go anywhere near the sea from this moment on.