Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Chris Green Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, but there were millions of these bottles on the streets and that is a total waste of resources; after one quick glug, they were thrown away. When I came to London from Derby on the train this week, I saw notices at the station saying, “Keep hydrated. Carry a bottle of water with you.” However, the station had nowhere where people could fill a bottle up with water, although we are given bottles of water on the train. That is unacceptable because those bottles are not recycled.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

I, too, took part in the London marathon and I can tell my hon. Friend that having a bottle was far better than having a cup because when you are jogging along you are going to bounce a lot of liquid out of the cup. Would it not be a really important innovation if both the top and the body of the bottle were made of the same plastic, as that would make recycling easier?

[Mrs Latham]

That would make recycling much easier. In the future, if we have the machines that will take these bottles, lots of entrepreneurial young people will be going to get these bottles and getting the money back. That scheme is a good idea, but we need to change the way people behave; we need to stop them using these things. The London marathon is a difficult case, because people need to keep hydrated when they are running.

As we heard from the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), children are really interested in this problem and they really care. They need to educate their parents, who tend to throw the rubbish out of the car window. We also need to continue this education when students get to university, because once they get there, they forget many of the lessons they learned when they were younger. We need to continue that education and make sure universities are places where both recycling and encouraging people not to use these plastics in the first place are very high priorities. I am not going to steal the thunder of my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), who is the Chairman of the Administration Committee, on which I serve, but I wish to mention the steps the Committee has taken and the recommendations of the House authorities, who have done an amazing job. We asked them to look at the problem within the House and they have gone a step further, and we are going to have radical change in this place. The House of Lords has agreed to this, too, so it will take place through both Houses. I am delighted about that, but I am sure we will hear the facts and figures later when my hon. Friend will be discussing this.

I also wish to commend the Foreign Office because it has made a big impact. It has introduced the latte levy and improved it, increasing it from 10p to 50p. The Foreign Office has got rid of plastic cups, crockery, cutlery, straws and single-use condiment sachets from all its London staff canteens. It is also providing reusable or biodegradable alternatives.

I am sorry I will not be here to hear the Minister’s answer on this because I am concerned about biodegradable products. I believe they just go into smaller pieces, animals still eat them and this is still going to cause a problem. If we can come up with innovative solutions, we can reduce the overall amount of plastic waste.

I read about a scheme where a community in the south-west took all its non-recyclable waste back to the supermarket at the end of one month. That was a huge amount of waste. The aim was to show the supermarket what a huge problem it is. We heard earlier about products such as Pringles, where the packaging is made of five different materials. I do not know whether some of these plastics are recyclable or not, because the logos are very confusing—given that I am interested in this subject, this is probably a problem for most people.

Instead of just us in this House changing our behaviour, every Department should be instructed to stop using single-use plastics. We cannot criticise other people unless the whole of government, in every Department, be it in London or in places such as the Department for International Development’s office in Glasgow, stops using this plastic. We will then be able to say to people, “We have put our house in order. Will you put yours in order?”

Time is short, so I shall finish by saying that instead of just not using the plastics, we ought to be investing money in trialling ways of reusing the plastics that are used. I understand that in Mexico houses are being built from plastic bottles. These houses are cheap and sustainable, and they will last for 500 years. We should invest in such alternative uses for plastics, if we have to have some of them, instead of just saying that we will burn them or put them into landfill if they cannot be recycled.

It is really important that the Government lead the world, and they need to lead from the front. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is incredibly keen on recycling and all things green, and I commend him for his energy and enthusiasm, but I am unhappy about the environment plan running for 25 years. I would like to see things happen much faster, and I would like the Government to look into investing in alternative technologies.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Lothian (Martin Whitfield). His speech was fantastic all the way through, but particularly at the beginning when he highlighted the importance of plastic and how it can be used to improve our environment. I thought that that was a really important point to make.

As so often, Bolton West leads the way and sets the agenda, and never more so than when it comes to the environment and recycling. Maiden speeches often set a strong agenda for hon. and right hon. Members, so I hope colleagues will not mind me quoting from Hansard. It says that

“our society has yet to recognise that we cannot afford the luxury of wasting so many of our limited resources. We cannot continue for ever adopting the shortsighted attitude of a society in which everything must be disposable, in the short term at least. Today we live in a society where the paper cup and paper tablecloth, and even paper sheets and plastic spoons, are taken for granted. We never count the real cost of these items. Planned obsolescence is now accepted by our society and we are now conditioned not to expect anything to last any length of time.

There are many different ways in which our society wastes its resources. For example every housewife knows, when she empties her shopping bag and puts away the shopping, how much paper, rubbish, cardboard, polystyrene and all sorts of other packaging ends up in the dustbin. We have layer upon layer of excessive and expensive packaging, most of which is not needed to maintain the quality of the goods we buy. If one buys a pound of apples in a supermarket today, one buys also a plastic tray and a load of cellophane. The housewife cannot afford the extra cost of all this, and the country cannot afford the waste and misuse of resources in this way.”—[Official Report, 12 November 1974; Vol. 881, c. 292.]

That was not my maiden speech. It was the maiden speech of one of my predecessors—Ann Taylor, Member for Bolton, West. She was speaking in 1974 about the importance of recycling and not having this consumer throwaway society. I look to my colleagues and friends in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—the most exciting and dynamic Department that we have in Parliament—to continue the work they are doing and to pursue this agenda. Let us not wait until 2062 to have yet another debate on this subject. Let us get there; let us do it now.