Plastic-free Packaging (Fruit and Vegetables)

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Westminster Hall

[Steve Double]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, which is directly related to the subject. As a country, we must ensure that when our residents do the responsible thing and recycle their plastic items, we do all we can to ensure that those items are actually recycled. There are disturbing reports that that may not always be happening. I believe that we—the country and the Government—have a responsibility to do all we can to ensure that it is.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good speech about this important subject and great e-petition. Does he accept that one problem is what and how we manufacture? Organisations such as the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge believe that we have to totally redesign the way we make all packaging to make it safer for the environment and human beings’ health.

[Steve Double]

That is indeed a huge challenge, which needs to be addressed from all angles. As the hon. Gentleman said, there are great challenges, particularly for developed countries, to reduce the amount of plastic that is produced and in circulation. We also need to ensure that we dispose responsibly of any plastic that is produced and ensure that it is not contributing to the environmental pollution that we have seen for far too long. That challenge has to be addressed from a number of different angles; I do not think there will ever be one simple solution.

The amount of plastic entering our seas is now a matter of huge concern for many people. As is well documented, it is estimated that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans. That is of concern not only because of the damage it is doing to the marine environment, but because that pollution is being ingested by humans as we eat the fish from the sea. We should really take the issue seriously and seek to address it.

It is right to acknowledge the steps the Government have already taken in reducing the amount of plastic pollution. It is well documented that the 5p plastic bag charge, introduced by the previous Conservative-led Government, has dramatically reduced the amount of plastic bags in use: by 83%. About 9 billion fewer plastic bags have been used since the introduction of that simple 5p charge. The Government have brought forward a comprehensive 25-year plan for the environment, including measures to look at reducing plastic waste and disposing of waste more responsibly. That should be welcomed. I want to join the many environmental groups that are calling for an introduction of plastic-free aisles and products in our supermarkets.

[Steve Double]

I guess the only answer to that question is no. We could always spend more on research, to reduce the amount of damage we are doing to our environment. I know there are a number of innovations coming forward in other forms of packaging that can provide the benefits of plastic without the damage to the environment. We should do all we can—I encourage the Government to consider anything they can do—to support and invest in those measures, to ensure that we are seeking not just to cut back on plastic, but to come forward with other answers to packaging that provide the benefits of plastic, but do not damage our environment.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is making such a good speech and responding well to interventions, so I thank him. A great friend of mine, Barry Van Danzig, the CEO of the Wastepack Group Limited, believes that the only way we can get past this problem is to make waste valuable. As soon as that happens, somebody will collect it. Money—the cash that it is worth—is at the heart of what we are all trying to achieve.

[Steve Double]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for another good intervention. I largely agree that recycling needs to become commercially viable: something that businesses invest in because they can make money from it. There are ways in which we can encourage that to happen—and we should, to get to the point where we do not send our plastic elsewhere to be recycled because its being recycled here has a value for our economy, as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) said. Clearly, we would all love that to happen.

I also acknowledge the recent Budget announcement of a new tax on the manufacture and import of plastic products that do not contain at least 30% recycled plastic. That is another important message from the Government, and it shows that they are taking the issue seriously and seeking to introduce solutions.

I turn to the specific issue of plastic packaging for fruit and vegetables in supermarkets. The petition rightly points out that it can be incredibly difficult for consumers to avoid purchasing items packaged in plastic, especially in the fruit and vegetable aisle. It is all too common for people to accept the fact that all our fruit and veg is wrapped in plastic, but several hon. Members present will admit to being old enough to remember when that was not the case. That our fruit and veg comes in a plastic wrapper is a relatively modern development, which we have accepted. It is right to challenge that now. We do not have to accept that norm: there could be alternative ways to reduce the amount of plastic used to package our food.

We have to strike the right balance, however. We do not want our desire to decrease plastic packaging to create another problem by increasing the amount of food waste produced. That is where innovation and other types of packaging that can protect and preserve our food should be encouraged and would be hugely welcomed. We need to acknowledge plastic’s benefits in preserving food, extending its shelf life and keeping it clean for consumption, while being aware of the damage it causes.

[Steve Double]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. The amount of fresh-food plastic packaging that is created contributes hugely to the amount of plastic waste that we as a country produce. It is estimated that about 800,000 tonnes of plastic waste are produced by supermarkets selling food in plastic packaging to households.

I am sure that we all have a favourite fresh-food item that is packaged in unnecessary plastic. I will not steal the thunder of other hon. Members who will comment on theirs, but mine is the cauliflower. When I go to buy a cauliflower from my local supermarket, I am astounded that it is in a plastic wrapper that does not even completely wrap it, so it cannot be argued that it is keeping it fresh. I am pretty sure that it is there simply for the supermarket’s convenience, so it can put a barcode on the wrapper. There are many examples where plastic is used not to keep the product fresh but for the supermarket’s convenience in transport and display. In those cases, a lot more could be done to reduce the amount of plastic packaging.

Another important factor is the change in British shopping habits. A few years ago, most of us would go to the supermarket once or perhaps twice a week and buy enough for several days, but according to many reports, two thirds of UK shoppers now visit the supermarket at least once a day. Many people shop daily, on their way home from work, to buy food for their meal that evening. Buying food that will stay in the house for several days and has to be kept fresh is no longer necessarily the key driver that it used to be for British supermarket shoppers.

I am greatly encouraged by the awareness and understanding of this issue among our young people. I often visit the local schools in my constituency and I am always pleasantly surprised by young pupils’ understanding of the issue of plastic waste, and the need to be responsible and to reduce the amount of it. That came through in the work that the House of Commons outreach and engagement team carried out in the lead-up to the debate. The team sought to engage with the public, particularly young people, to seek their views, and of the 1,000 students from 19 different schools that it contacted, 76% agreed that supermarkets should offer plastic-free options for fresh produce, and about half said that reducing plastic packaging was one of the biggest ways that we could reduce the amount of plastic waste. I thank all the students and schools who engaged in that process and helped us to gather those views. We appreciate their input.

[Mr Sheerman]

Parliament has conducted an excellent education process. I visit schools to talk about the subject too, but it is complex. For children and adults, looking at what comes into the house and goes out through the kitchen is difficult. They have to look so carefully at what is recyclable and what is not. Companies such as Tetra Pak, the global company from Sweden, have made it even more difficult. Clarity about what can be recycled is surely at the heart of education.

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[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. My hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) and the hon. Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq) set out clearly the environmental aspects of the issue. I will not repeat what they said, but I acknowledge the truth of what they said and the enormous impact that plastic has on our environment.

We had a bit of a tour of people’s favourite fruit and vegetables—my hon. Friend mentioned the cauliflower and the hon. Lady mentioned the avocado. Let me add the cucumber to the list. My biggest bugbear with the cucumber is the plastic it is wrapped in. I do not know where my hon. Friend got his figure that most plastic lasts only minutes. It takes me minutes to get the plastic off the cucumber, let alone to dispose of it. I often end up having to extract bits of plastic from the salad I make with the cucumber because I was not able to get it all off.

The difficulty is that plastic plays an important part in the life of the cucumber. Without plastic the cucumber would probably last for a maximum of three days—that is the time it would take the water in it to evaporate—whereas with plastic it can last up to 14 days. I repeat what I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend: we need much more research and innovation to replace the sorts of plastics we currently use with new forms of covering that keep some of the characteristics of those plastics.

That leads to a number of other questions, including about the quantity of food we buy and the fact that there is little seasonality in the market. We can go out and buy anything the whole year round.

[Mr Sheerman]

I know that the hon. Gentleman knows a great deal about this subject. I beg everyone involved in this area to think holistically. We all know that we can get any fruit or vegetable at any time of the year, but it will probably have been flown 500 or 3,000 miles to get to our kitchen. I feel sympathy for him. I would hesitate to accept an invitation to eat a salad at his house. If he popped into a local farmers’ market, he might find something a lot fresher with no plastic.

[John Howell]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I was going to invite him to dinner, but since that would be refused—

[Mr Sheerman]

As long as it’s not salad, I’ll come.

[John Howell]

That is fine.

The hon. Gentleman is right that by popping into a farmers’ market one can get a cucumber raw, as it were. Like anyone else, I like to eat the things I like the whole year round, but I take the point that the economics of delivering them may mean they have been flown 3,000 or 5,000 miles. I question whether those economics are sound and sustainable in the long term. If that means I have to cut down on certain foods, I shall probably be none the poorer in health terms.

Turning for a moment from the cucumber to other fruit and veg, I notice that there has already been quite a development in fruit packaging, even in supermarkets. I think innovations have already been made in packaging for fruit, a lot of which is recyclable. Berries are a good example of that.

[John Howell]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The way we look at this issue is important. My district council always does very well on recycling, but it needs to look at non-recyclable elements such as plastic, which represent its biggest cost.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman touches on a very interesting area. Does he know that the evaluation we have done in the all-party parliamentary sustainable resource group looks at the quality of local authorities’ management of waste management? I beg him to consider what has happened in Oxford. The whole place has been transformed by good management and the city now makes money out of recycling rather than its being a cost to the local ratepayer.

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[John Mc Nally]

I agree with everything the hon. Gentleman has said, and I will come to that point later.

Plastic food packaging that is not recycled is costing Scotland an estimated £11 million annually. That needs to change, and the Scottish Government are taking appropriate measures to address that problem. I congratulate the Westminster Government on following the example of the devolved Governments by, for example, introducing a plastic bag charge. Wales introduced a charge in 2011, and over the first year that the ban was in place, it achieved a 71% reduction in the number of bags used. Northern Ireland achieved a two-thirds reduction in bag use over the first year. Scotland achieved an 80% reduction in bag use in 2014, and after England introduced its 5p bag scheme, it achieved an 80% reduction in the first six months. Those are all good strides forward, and the absence of blue bags on our streets is probably the most visible achievement. We do not see those bags anymore.

[Mr Sheerman]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, faced with the dreadful dilemma of global warming, a plastic bag charge is a small part of what we can do? We are in the foothills. Should we not raise our game and look at the environment in the holistic sense? At least we should have a Government who see the damage. The hon. Gentleman knows, as I do, that we in this country were still burying our waste in holes in the ground until we became members of the European Union, which made us stop. As we come out of the European Union, we are going to be dragged back into the dark ages.

[John Mc Nally]

Again, the hon. Gentleman makes good points. I assure him that we on the Environmental Audit Committee were warned about becoming the dirty man of Europe once again, and I hope that we will be given a reassurance today that we will not go down that path. I share the hon. Gentleman’s anxieties. We are at a pivotal moment when we can change these things, and the world is with us—probably through the work of the great David Attenborough, who has beautifully highlighted all the problems. I ask the Minister to reassure us that all retailers, rather than just a select few, will be charged accordingly, as happens in all the other home nations.

In 2017, the Scottish Government launched an initiative to develop a fit-for-purpose deposit return scheme to tackle everyday waste problems, such as single-use plastic and single-use items that are disposed of. I praise the UK Government for attending the summit in London in July this year, organised by the Scottish Government, to discuss how the home nations can co-operate to develop deposit return schemes that are fit for purpose, and nudge everyone into better habits when disposing of plastic and single-use items.

[John Mc Nally]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and there are two sides to the argument. We have to start somewhere—that is a certainty—and the way we are recycling at the moment is not the best way, which is a point that I hope to touch on later. I know that deposit retail schemes involve some complicated systems, but there may be ways to make them commercially viable that would get more people involved.

[Mr Sheerman]

Let’s do them both.

[John Mc Nally]

Exactly—why not do both? We would like to hear how those schemes can be developed, and that will have to happen across all the home nations and probably across the whole world.

We are all aware that there is a problem with how we dispose of, for example, plastic cotton buds. Those have been banned for years in America, but we are still using them here, which is unacceptable. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on flood prevention, I know those buds are a constant problem: they are used in schools and colleges, they go down waste pipes and plug holes, and they cost a fortune. They cause problems, including for insurance companies, so at the end of the day we all have to pay for them. Those problems are totally avoidable. We do not need those buds, and action has to be taken. In Scotland, we are trying to ban the manufacture of plastic stem cotton buds. We announced our plans in January this year, and the UK Government followed in October. I believe that Wales is behind in this area, which is surprising: it has been leading on a lot of these policies, but it is behind the curve in this area.

I have visited supermarkets and other retailers in my constituency of Falkirk. They all recognise the need to reduce the quantity of plastic used in packaging for the sake of sustainability, and without a doubt customers also feel a desire to reduce the amount of plastic packaging they buy. Although that is a challenge, it could ultimately be a win-win situation for retailers: they could improve sustainability and cut packaging costs.

Those retailers are tackling that problem in creative ways, which is extremely encouraging. For example, they are seeking to eliminate the use of black plastic, so the plastic they do use can be easily sorted and recycled. Familiar items such as milk bottles and plastic trays are being redesigned to make them lighter, increase the use of recycled plastic in their manufacture, and eliminate the use of unnecessary and unrecyclable items.

However, I visited Dobbies in Perth last week—I was at a funeral in that city, and went for a cup of coffee with my wife—and there was an advert on a screen about how to use plastic when building up Christmas decorations. I thought, “How on earth can they be doing that in this day and age?” That should not have been on the screen at all.

Falkirk Council is phasing out single-use plastics in its offices and introducing initiatives to help communities recycle. TerraCycle, a UK-wide company, is helping communities arrange convenient pick-up points for recycling. Through Keep Scotland Beautiful and Zero Waste Scotland, the Scottish Government have funded initiatives such as Revive Falkirk, teaching people what they can do to reduce food waste and make low-carbon dietary and life choices as well as the skills they need to upcycle or repurpose discarded goods.

Small, often family-run companies such as Forth Valley Recycling & Packaging and Nathans Wastesavers in my home town of Denny are establishing themselves at the forefront of this new economic sector. The many ethical companies across Scotland and the UK need certainty that standards will be maintained and aligned post-Brexit. Will the Minister comment on whether the new policies that are coming forward will be aligned to those standards?

Plastic packaging is only part of the story. Making a concerted effort to effectively tackle this problem requires addressing issues such as fly-tipping and lack of public waste infrastructure—what we on the Environmental Audit Committee have called “binfrastructure”. It surely cannot be beyond the wit of manufacturers and local authorities across the UK to harmonise colour-coded bins to match colour-coded products. Why can we not have a green label to match a green bin, an amber label to match an amber bin, and a red label to match a red bin, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) touched on earlier? It is so confusing; nobody seems to know what to do when they get all their material together. We need to prevent waste going into our bins unnecessarily.

Last year, environmental prosecutions in England were at a record low. Responsibility for that was laid at the feet of local authorities in England, while simultaneously, those authorities’ funding was being slashed. That is short-termism at its absolute worst. The UK could learn a lot from Scotland’s collaborative approach, bringing together enforcing agencies and other stakeholders to tackle fly-tipping. The Scottish Government set up a national Environmental Crime Taskforce in 2013, which co-ordinates the efforts of local authorities, regulators, police and other stakeholders in tackling environmental crime, including waste crime. There are tools, and there is guidance to support them. For example, Zero Waste Scotland has created the FlyMapper tool for local authorities and land managers, which lets stakeholders report and map fly-tipping, identifying growing “grot spots” in real time.

Those are all good initiatives, but the petition to stop waste and plastic misuse gives a better option for the consumer by highlighting the need to prevent the problem from happening in the first place by going to the source: the manufacturing stage. I love that the petition acknowledges that change is required and suggests that supermarkets be put under scrutiny to ensure they are taking their corporate responsibilities seriously. That would be welcome.

To finish, I want to offer something personal. In my family, we like dirty carrots. My mother is 97, and when I go out she wants dirty carrots brought back. She does not want anything wrapped in plastic. We try to do exactly the same: we use locally grown produce, particularly from farm shops, markets and our local independent greengrocers. It is good practice. We know it cuts down on emissions and helps the local economy thrive. I am all for enabling local, independent greengrocers to thrive.