Unsustainable Packaging Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Alex Sobel
Main Page: Alex Sobel (Labour (Co-op) - Leeds Central and Headingley)Department Debates - View all Alex Sobel's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Unsustainable Packaging
Alex Sobel Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
As a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, on which the Minister served when we had the inquiry, we heard from groups in countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand that they had UK plastic on their shores. Is it not time that we stopped exporting plastic waste and reprocessed it all here in the United Kingdom?
Daniel Zeichner
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, which I am about to amplify. He is absolutely right that we have international responsibilities. As the public watched, listened and participated, that so grabbed society’s consciousness that a constituent wrote to me saying that there should be “regular showings and reshowings” of those programmes, as they are so convincing and powerful. I suspect in Cambridge they are rewatched on a regular basis already.
Attenborough calls plastic waste an “unfolding catastrophe”, and, sadly, the evidence backs that up. A report from charities Tearfund, Fauna and Flora International, and WasteAid has warned of a public health emergency, claiming that between 400,000 and 1 million people die each year because of preventable diseases linked to mismanaged plastic waste in developing countries. These diseases include diarrhoea, malaria and cancer, all of which researchers have linked to plastic waste building up near people’s homes or being burned, which can result in damaging fumes.