Reduction of Plastic Waste in the Marine Environment

Debate between Alistair Carmichael and Greg Knight

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policy on reducing plastic waste in the marine environment.

It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. Another week, another debate on plastics in the marine environment. I welcome the Minister back to her now familiar position. I consider myself fortunate to have obtained this debate, and I am delighted to see such a healthy turnout of Members from all parts of the House.

This issue has become quite fashionable of late. It has certainly come to public attention since the BBC screened its “Blue Planet” series last year. But what people now understand is something that I as an islander, and others who live in coastal communities, have known for some years—that the amount of plastic in our marine environment has been growing exponentially for years and is now a massive danger to us all. People just have to walk along any beach to see that. The part of the world I represent is famed for its clean environment, but the number of coffee cups, food containers, fishing nets and ropes that we find even on our otherwise very attractive beaches provides evidence of that. That is actually the easy stuff, because we can remove it with beach clean-ups, but it does not remain on the beach; it is taken back out to sea and reduced until it eventually becomes much more difficult to remove from the marine environment.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that Europe and the USA are responsible for only about 2% of ocean litter? Although it matters not to a dolphin or turtle where the plastic it is being strangled by or choking on came from, that means that those of us who wish to address this subject need to focus on rapidly developing countries with inadequate waste disposal systems.

[Mr Carmichael]

Absolutely. I read recently that about 90% of the plastic in the world’s oceans comes from 10 rivers in Africa and Asia. I say to the right hon. Gentleman, though, that an awful lot of things are going to have to change, one of which is how we see and think of the marine environment. It has frustrated me for years that things that happen on the high seas are out of sight and out of mind. That applies not just to this issue but to things such as shipping standards. The way we ship oil around the world occasionally comes home very graphically when something goes wrong and there is a major oil spillage.

I come back to how I, as an islander, see the world. So many people see the sea as something that divides us from other places; as an islander, I see it as something that joins us to other places. People who take that view understand that with that attitude comes a shared responsibility for ensuring that our marine environment is as clean as it can be. However, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that what we do in this country is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Inevitably, we will need to work much more closely with people in other parts of the world. I will touch on that later.

The Environmental Audit Committee estimates that we use about 2.5 billion single-use cups, and that only one in 400 of them is recycled. Consider the report in The Guardian today about the way in which wet wipes are changing the shape of our river beds. Thames21 found no fewer than 5,453 wet wipes on 116 square metres of the Thames embankment near Hammersmith. Of course, what starts in our rivers eventually ends up in our oceans.