You can now say with confidence that you are doing your bit. Following a favourite maxim from the world of self-help, you are controlling the stuff that is within your control. You’ve instituted strategies and shopping lists, and perhaps even convinced reluctant family members to change their ways too. You’ve seen that small changes can yield big results. So now on to the next step. What big changes can you campaign for, cheer on and support that will help to bring about a decisive shift? There are a number of initiatives already in play that will bring about a sea of change. Adding our voice to the chorus calling for these changes will help turn the tide.
GROWN-UP POLICY
In 2007 the economist Nicholas Stern produced an environmental report, and while most people might never find the time to read it (at a hefty 700 pages, it wasn’t exactly a summer reading essential) it helped to change the conversation on climate change. The Stern Review basically compared the cost of inaction to that of policy and regulatory changes. Guess what? It was substantially cheaper to act now and reduce emissions than to do nothing and wait for catastrophic climate change.78
Today, practically none of the manufacturers or retailers – the people who benefit from cheap, oil-based packaging – pay anything like the true environmental cost of cleaning it up. Moreover, the real cost of our collective plastic binge is yet to be properly accounted for. We need a version of the Stern Review on the cost of inaction on plastic. By April 2018 things were looking up when forty-two major businesses, including leading food and drinks brands, manufacturers and retailers, right through to plastic reprocessors, joined the UK Plastics Pact, convened by WRAP, and pledged to rethink the design, use and recycling of plastic. If not quite the radical move that campaigners had lobbied for, it was a step in the right direction, not least because the UK Plastics Pact spans the entire plastics supply chain.
THE UBER COLLECTOR: BOTTLE DEPOSIT SCHEME
Campaigners on plastic had begun to sound like broken records, and the continuous refrain went something like this: ‘Why don’t we have a bottle deposit system in this country?’ After all, the evidence from countries in the Baltic region with a deposit refund on beverage containers was compelling. In data from Finland, Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and Denmark, plastic bottles do not feature in the top ten objects found on beach cleans. In the UK they edge into the top three.
In spring 2018 it was announced that after a government review, England would adopt the same system (Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have yet to make that decision). Although we still don’t have a firm date for the scheme’s introduction, food retailer Iceland has gone ahead and installed the first Reverse Vending Machine, part of the apparatus of the system, in its Fulham store to trial it. I am delighted by this progress. Bottle deposit systems boost recycling rates hugely. In Norway and Sweden, where such schemes have been running for a while, the collection rate for plastic bottles is a cool 97 per cent. In Norweigan, the process and system has its own word, ‘Panteordning’. Perhaps that will catch on here, like ‘Hygge’ – the Danish word for cosiness and warm hearts and hearths – caught on, at least for a while.
It works by attaching a small levy to the drinks bottle: across Europe it ranges between eight and twenty-two pence. The charge stays with the bottle as it moves from wholesaler to shop to consumer. As a customer, you pay the levy when you buy the drink, but when you return it you collect your money (normally via a voucher). The bottles are typically returned by popping them into a Reverse Vending Machine such as the one installed by Iceland. The machine scans the barcode and issues a refund voucher.
THE MATERIAL INNOVATORS
Brilliant innovations often arise incrementally, through years of trial, error and great effort. Just as the early inventors of plastic carried out thousands of experiments to create the first crude polymers, the innovators of today are jumping through hoops to find ways of reimagining them.
Nearly a decade ago, I came across Anna Bullus, a student of product design from Brighton. Her material of choice was unlike that of any other student I’d met before (and I have met many, and even filled in as a guest lecturer from time to time). Anna is obsessed with pre-chewed, secondhand chewing gum. If you had to pick a truly ghastly material to work with, this would fulfil most people’s idea of the worst. But from the mouths of slack-jawed chewers, Anna saw potential. More precisely she saw that chewing gum contains synthetic rubber, a form of plastic that, if she could just get hold of it, could be recovered and put to good use elsewhere.
Like any good product designer, Anna is a solution-oriented person. She observed that the discarded, chewed gum was tough to remove from pavements without a lot of effort and a very powerful jet hose. As you chew, you swallow the nice bit of the chewing gum – the flavour and the sweetener – and you are left with what is essentially super-flexible plastic. If dropped on the ground, or stuck under a desk, these large hydrocarbons are squished out to become virtually inseparable from the surface.
Bullus devised her ingenious Gumdrop bin. In unmissable hot pink, the cute round bin seemed to entice people to deposit their gum in it rather than on the floor. If she’d have stopped there, that would have been a win, but the real genius of her innovation was in the material she used for the bin. It’s made of Gum-tec®, her own polymer, which contains at least 20 per cent recycled chewing gum in the mix. Ten years on from our first meeting, there are hundreds of Gumdrops across the country, especially in areas with heavy student traffic (apparently big chewers) and at stations. When the Gumdrop is full – each can take 500 pieces – the whole bin is collected and processed as one piece of plastic.
Chopped up into flakes and then pelletised, the new plastic is sent to a factory in Leicester where the whole process begins again. The actual Gum-tec® formula is secret, but Bullus confirms that one full Gumdrop makes three more new bins. Since our first meeting, Bullus has expanded her range of products to include stationery, wellies, even the soles of shoes and coffee cups – all in her trademark hot pink.
Some might be squeamish about drinking from a coffee cup made from gum that was once chewed by someone else, but I wish we would think less about the ickiness and our own preoccupations and celebrate the ingenuity. When it comes to reclaiming and reprocessing plastic, high-temperature processing destroys any trace of former use. What we have is a brand-new, eminently sterile material, ready for another life.
THE REIMAGINERS
The mindset of reimagination is crucial if we’re ever going to embrace the circular economy. As we’ve seen over the course of these pages, we currently have a very linear approach to plastic. We buy it, use it, get rid of it. In many cases, the actual plastic is a side issue, considered worthless, if we stop to consider it at all. In the circular economy all materials have a value, especially plastic. They are not only reclaimed, but endlessly recycled so that, in effect, waste is designed out of the economy. Imagine if every company, every brand, every manufacturer was begging you to send their empties back. Imagine a tussle at your back door every time you were about to use the last drop of washing-up liquid – a scenario reminiscent of years gone by, when kids desperately waited to make Tracy Island as seen on Blue Peter.
This is, admittedly, a rather extreme imagining of what a future fully circular model might hold in store. But if it sounds fanciful, it is an idea that is gaining traction. In 2016 the Scottish Government announced a strategy that would move the nation closer to a circular economy. The strategy lays out a set of goals and actions that the Scottish government will undertake, including ambitious levels of household recycling and reprocessing, in order to build in circularity so that materials retain their value and are kept in use for as long as possible. Let’s hope the rest of the UK doesn’t get left behind.
The high priestess of the global circular economy movement is Dame Ellen MacArthur, something of a British heroine. Even if you didn’t know much about the ocean or sailing on it, by the noughties you knew of Ellen MacArthur. Ellen brought sailing to a whole new generation when she took part in the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world yacht race in 2001 when she was just twenty-four. Finishing in ninety-four days, she became the youngest competitor ever to finish the race, the fastest yachtswoman around the globe and only the second person to go round the world solo in 100 days. It was one of those occasions when you felt like the entire nation was holding its breath, watching and agonising as she sent back her video dispatches. One thing we certainly got: this was a tough sport and she had what they call true grit.
Ellen MacArthur became one of those rare people who has experienced rationing resources and reusing everything around her – not as a whimsical experiment, but as a matter of life or death. In essence, her boat became a survival capsule that she endured for the ninety-four days of the race. She was acutely aware of her resources before, during and after those days. Everything was meticulously planned – even the amount of kitchen roll she could carry. Subsequently she seems to have seen the boat as a microcosm: it was her world full of supplies that had to be perfectly and exactly regulated so that she didn’t run out. Unsurprisingly, it changed her perspective on the world and its resources in a profound and really useful way.
From this vantage point, and now retired from sailing, Ellen MacArthur is dedicated to tackling plastic and pursuing a circular economy. Through her eponymous foundation, she and her team have produced a blueprint for transformation: the New Plastics Economy – it’s one of my favourites! What appeals to me is the vision it offers of a global economy in which plastics never become waste, and of how we can achieve that goal, step by step. In the same way that we can disrupt the flow of plastic into our homes by following some of the steps outlined in the previous chapters, the proposition outlined in MacArthur’s blueprint disrupts plastic on a global and industrial scale. I’m clearly not the only fan: forty of the world’s biggest brands have signed up to the New Plastics Economy. This includes the giant Unilever group of companies, from whom, statistically speaking, you most likely buy a big proportion of your household items. By 2025, all of the corporation’s plastic packaging will be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable. I have to admit, it sounds great. If Unilever and others were able to achieve this, it could make our new, plastic-reducing lives problem-free.
MELTING AWAY
In the scenario above it would almost be as if our troubles with plastic might melt away like lemon drops. But I can’t help picking up on the word ‘compostable’. It’s the most radical scenario, but is it even possible? Compostable or biodegradable plastics promise much, but will they deliver?
The UK is not only the birthplace of conventional plastic, tracking its heritage back to the nineteenth century, but it is also where some of the first defined oil-free bioplastics were created. In these, hydrocarbons are substituted for cellulose, the main substance in plant cell walls and the most abundant organic matter on earth. These bioplastics would – according to the theory – biodegrade in the earth as oxygen breaks down the chains of molecules which return to the soil without harm.
As early as the 1970s, some engineers and scientists cottoned on to the fact that increasing plastic production and usage each year was a very bad idea. Instead, the answer was to invent an alternative where you could control the degradation of the material, rather than having it hanging around for aeons. The late Professor Gerald Scott was an early champion of biopolymer research at Aston University in Birmingham, spearheading work on a biodegradable plastic that would not be made from oil. In 1972 he warned a journalist from the Daily Mirror that already that year the UK had got through 250,000 tons of indestructible plastic waste that would hang around for centuries: ‘I would like to see artificial material made so that it can be reconstituted – used over and over again,’ he said, sounding very much like Ellen MacArthur today. To that end, he developed a bioplastic.
For the early pioneers of bioplastics, timing the point at which the material would begin to degrade or dissolve proved to be a sticky issue, sometimes rather literally. If you think about it, this is a major concern. One of the bonuses of regular plastic is that you know where you are with it – it’s virtually indestructible. But how do you make sure the polymers don’t start to degrade while you’re drinking a hot drink from a biodegradable cup, or running down the road in your synthetic sportswear? Too-rapid degradation could lead to embarrassment and, worse still, injury.
In Professor Scott’s early experiments with the bioplastic material, the colour would change to an alarmingly violent hue, indicating that it was about to dissolve. It did not exactly catch on, although years later I would ‘road test’ a skirt and top by a major fashion label made from Ingeo – a bio-starch resin made from corn. This was a proposed solution to our increasing tendency to consume and discard fashion very quickly; at the time it was calculated that two million tonnes of clothing and textile waste hit landfill dumps every year. Rather than suggesting to spoiled consumers that we should consume less, the idea was that we could simply compost our clothes after we’d fallen out of love with them. Thankfully my outfit did not violently change colour or dissolve in the late afternoon, but it wasn’t exactly a fashion win.
The designer Helen Storey, working with scientist Tony Ryan, has also designed pieces made from sugar. I came across a particularly beautiful dress in an exhibition. But you’ll have to take my word for that, since at the end of the evening, it was dunked in water and dissolved before our eyes. Ingeo is now primarily used to make compostable food packaging.
While bioplastics might seem quirky, experts suggest we should get set for an ‘aggressive explosion’ of them. It is predicted that by 2050, nearly 50 per cent of the plastics we use will be derived from plants. This has led to worries about the use of arable land, needed for food production, being annexed for packaging. A short version of that quandary is, ‘Would you rather feed the world or wrap a cucumber?’
But since the great awakening and our Blue Planet II moment, bioplastics are back in the frame. Up and down the country, I have met communities of anti-plastic warriors who are swapping out petro-plastics and switching to coffee cups and disposable nappies made with bioplastic. This strategy has the added attraction that it seems to offer a way to carry on using single-use disposable items.
But beware! I’ve met many a keen plastic-reducer who has been lulled into a false sense of security by bioplastics. They may be unlinking their consumption from oil, but it’s not quite the full story. Bioplastics are still so niche that they present a bit of a problem: what’s missing here is an end game. Some look and behave like regular plastic, so can easily end up in recycling. But made of plant plastic, they have a lower melting point and can cause havoc should they infiltrate the high-temperature cleaning process devised for their petrol-based cousins. Many people assume that they will degrade in landfill. But in landfill there is almost a complete lack of oxygen, which is needed to cause the chain of molecules to break down, and therefore, for the item to biodegrade.
Of course, bioplastic is known as ‘compostable’ for a reason. It should surely end up on a compost heap where it can break down into rich, dark organic matter and then help out in the garden. This also sounds like great news, especially given that 40 per cent of garden owners in the UK keep a working compost heap. But there’s a snag here, too. In our temperate climatic zone, our compost heaps and bins only manage to reach typically weedy temperatures. There are probably just a couple of days in high summer each year when our compost gets close to the temperature required to kick off the breakdown of most bioplastic. A dear friend whose green values compelled her to use compostable nappies for her eldest son tells me she still comes across them from time to time when digging her garden. The nappies are pretty much intact. Her son is fourteen. That’s what we term an eco fail, albeit a well-meaning one.
But if there’s one thing we’ve been taught in recent years, it’s that things are progressing quickly. It would be foolish to write this technology off just yet. Just as solar panels and electric vehicles have taken giant leaps forward to become credible alternatives, why shouldn’t bioplastics have their day in the sun? From cutlery and plates to single-use coffee cups and lids and even face wipes, it is getting easier to lay your hands on products that declare themselves compostable. In truth there are a number of different symbols in use, which is confusing. Most suggest some leaves and an arrow indicating the leaves come from the ground. They should display the British standard, BS EN 13432, that tells you packaging is ‘compostable’, or BS EN 14995 for a ‘compostable’ plastic item. If you know the name of the company, you can type it into the database of one of the biggest global certifiers of bioplastic items to see if it’s listed (https://www.bpiworld.org/CertifiedCompostable). But if you are in the market for bioplastic alternatives, think about collection. Some forward-thinking cafes and restaurants are signed up to compost collection schemes. Their bioplastic empties are spirited away to industrial composting facilities (known as In-Vessel Composters) that easily achieve the necessary temperatures.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes a chemistry revolution is taking place as innovators race to create plant-based polymers that will both perform as we need and biodegrade when we want. Niall Dunne is CEO of Polymateria, based in laboratories at Imperial College London. In the labs here, scientists are in pursuit of full biodegradability. This is clever stuff, including driving down the molecular weight of bioplastics to create molecules small enough for bacteria to break down efficiently. Dunne’s stated aim is to create the ‘Tesla of plastics’, eliminating plastic pollution by radical innovation and doing for bioplastics what Elon Musk has done for electric vehicles, i.e., remove the stigma and make them highly desirable.
WEARING WASTE
Making plastic waste aspirational is key to the transformation of our relationship with it. We are simply that type of species. The more we covet something, the more we engage with it, and this hasn’t been lost on sportswear giant Adidas. In 2014, Adidas produced its first collection of trainers made from ocean plastic – waste collected from the ocean and turned into high-tech yarn. Featuring a blue and aquamarine colour palette, the shoes looked to all the world like a very cool trainer, but the backstory and idea that we could help reduce ocean pollution made them incredibly sought after. Several collections later, Adidas has refined the marine-waste yarn until it resembles a high-tech cord. Consumer appetite for ocean plastic products, including trainers, continues to soar.
The Adidas range is the brainchild of Cyrill Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans, an organisation that focuses the brains of creatives and designers on the problem of the plastic pandemic and asks them to find cool solutions. A former designer, Gutsch is evangelical about the role of consumers in the plastic pandemic. He thinks it’s down to the modern-day consumer to save the oceans by buying smarter. Oh, and he considers oil-based plastics to be an epic design fail: ‘It is time to do better and invent a smarter material.’79
FISHING FOR PLASTIC
This season, it’s not only trainers that come in ocean plastic, either. From board shorts to evening dresses, the fashion world has embraced yarn made from recovered plastics. In September 2017, I attended the Green Carpet Fashion Awards in Milan, where A-listers strutted their stuff on a green carpet woven from Econyl, a recovered yarn made from fishing nets. The appetite is certainly there, but what of the practicality of recovering plastic trash from the ocean? And how much, realistically, can we remove? Given that there is estimated to be 80,000 tonnes of plastic floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone, surely it is a tall order to dream of removing even a fraction of it?
But this in essence is absolutely the dream of Boyan Slat, the Dutch wunderkind who first encountered the plastic pandemic when he was on holiday in Greece. Diving, he came across more plastic bags than fish, and started coming up with solutions. Based in Delft in the Netherlands, he dropped out of university and a degree in Aeronautical Engineering at the age of seventeen to create The Ocean Cleanup. Boyan’s big idea – and everything he does is at scale – is to allow the ocean to clean itself. Inspired by the manta ray fish, he created a platform with long strings of floating booms that sift plastics from the water. The booms are connected to the ocean floor in a zigzag formation, allowing the ocean currents to run into them, trapping the maximum amount of plastic. ‘The oceanic currents creating these gyres are not an obstacle – they are the solution. Let’s use our enemy to our advantage,’ he has said.80
In the summer of 2018 Boyan, now twenty-three, and his Ocean Cleanup team transported their mach II array from the workshop in Delft to San Francisco, where it was towed miles offshore. In underwater photographs, the array technology resembles a long string of giant air cushions being dragged behind a boat. After more testing, Boyan hopes to set the array to work on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, trying to clean up as much of that 80,000 tonnes as possible.
Critics of Boyan – and there are plenty of them – allege that his ocean cleaning is a preoccupation and that both resources and his talent would be better spent if he focused on reducing our use of plastic. When he’s interviewed on this point he tends to be sanguine, admitting that he doesn’t know if he will succeed. ‘I just thought it was important to at least try,’ he told a journalist in 2017.81 I admire that sentiment.