Dáil gets pollution petition - Plastics: Act now on the crisis
One of the highlights of a great American film The Graduate occurs during a conversation between a young man who is wondering about his future after graduation and his father’s business partner who offers career advice to the worried youngster. It can be shortened as follows: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Older readers might remember the 1967 film fondly.
The older man was, we now know, right. There was a great future in plastics, more bountiful than anyone in the business then when milk was being delivered in glass bottles and fish and chips were wrapped in yesterday’s newspapers could have imagined. Its ubiquity is beyond measure. A global industry, its output is found not only in packaging but also in building and construction, electronics, aerospace, medicine, and transportation. One estimate suggests that 1m plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute.
There is so much of it, and so many jobs involved in its manufacture, that environment ministers could be forgiven by the exceptionally generous for thinking that nothing of any significance can be done to turn the plastic tide; that all they can do is make the right noises, applaud local re-cycling schemes, commission studies, and wait until the next cabinet reshuffle gets them shifted to a department in which they can actually be seen getting things done or, failing that, a cushy number at the United Nations.
Our new environment minister, Richard Bruton, has the opportunity to demonstrate that governments can act, even in small ways, to take on what Friends of the Earth and other eco-groups have rightly called the plastic waste crisis they describe in the 30,000-signature petition handed taken to the Dáil yesterday in readiness for last night’s debate on the problem. This can be done by retrieving the Waste Reduction Bill from the bin into which it was chucked by his predecessor and getting it into law as swiftly as possible.
A crackdown on plastic bottles, a levy on plastic take-away cups and an end to plastic straws; such measures will not in themselves solve the crisis, but they would help to start the process of controlling a pollution threat that we now know is becoming exceptionally personal. Plastic particles have been found not only in fish but also, according to a limited but significant study in Vienna, in human waste. Food diaries kept by the study’s participants — from Japan, Russia and Europe — revealed that all of them had eaten food wrapped in plastic or had drunk water from plastic bottles.
There is only so much that consumers can do when buying food and other goods. Some of the stuff we need is packed
in plastic for sound safety reasons, but much of it isn’t, the purpose being simply to make the package look prettier or more interesting. Much more needs to be done to put pressure not only shoppers to be more plastic-aware but also on manufacturers, distributors and retailers to get needless plastic out of their supply chains. Then, perhaps, an older man’s advice to a young graduate might be different: “Plastics ... there’s not a great future in plastics.”
