Unsustainable Packaging

Deidre Brock Excerpts

Monday 24th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir George.

The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) spoke about the mood of the public changing—he noted that—and this petition is a testament to that, as is the quality of the contributions to the debate today; that quality has really shown that change, as well. There has been a great deal of passion and commitment to real change shown by the speakers in this debate and I commend everyone who has taken part for that.

The hon. Gentleman also paid tribute to those programmes, such as “Blue Planet II”, that have brought these problems home to each one of us; indeed, they have brought them directly into our homes.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the impressive work of the Petitions Committee staff, with some 20,000 people having been surveyed. That is a huge number of people whose views we have taken into account and the survey has given us some incredibly useful statistics. I thank him for listing some of those statistics and look forward to looking up the rest of them, because that was obviously a really valuable exercise. It was interesting to hear exactly what packaging—or rather, the lack of packaging—remarkable numbers of people seem prepared to accept.

The hon. Gentleman highlighted what is something of a Catch-22 situation, with companies increasing production of genuinely recyclable packaging while we still lack the necessary infrastructure to properly deal with it. I suggest to the Minister that extra investment is urgently needed in that respect.

The hon. Gentleman made a very useful point about the importance of remembering to consider the whole lifecycle—that analysis of what is being packaged. It is also important to remember that items need to be reused considerably more times than they are now before they are simply thrown away, or indeed recycled.

The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) brought back happy memories for me of hunting for returnable bottles and exchanging the extra cash for sweeties, I am afraid to say. However, he also called for an end to Government box-ticking exercises, a proper appreciation of what is recyclable, and proper co-ordination between different local authorities. That issue exists in Scotland too, and I know that the Scottish Government are keen to try to iron out some of the differences in recycling approaches.

The hon. Gentleman also talked about the compostable cups that are now in use in Parliament. It is perhaps worth pointing out for the record that they are for commercial composting—they are not really for household composting—and the company that produces them also provides a collection service to enable that commercial composting to happen. I know that because the company’s HQ is located in my constituency; I will say more on the company later.

The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) mentioned the excellent initiative of Scottish Water, which I would love to see being rolled out throughout the UK by different water companies. It involves installing free water fountains, like the Victorian fountains that were once so common everywhere. They are fountains for residents and visitors alike throughout Scotland, and it is a pleasure to see them after so many of the older, mainly Victorian water fountains fell out of favour.

The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) quoted David Attenborough speaking of “the age of plastic”. She rightly pointed out that plastic was once very enthusiastically welcomed, but also spoke of the flipside of the “plastic curse”; she mentioned nurdles and micro-fibres and many other things that I have certainly become aware of through some of my beach clean-up days with the Wardie Bay beachwatch in my constituency. She also spoke of other very serious legacy issues for plastic. She called for the Government to address those and to commit to actions to deal with that “plastic soup”, which is a phrase that I think will stick forever in my memory; it is very unfortunate that we even have to think of such a thing.

The hon. Lady also called on us all to show joined-up thinking, saying that we should aim for that truly circular economy. She also mentioned clingfilm, so I should mention the fact that my mother still washes clingfilm and drapes it on the kitchen taps. She has done so for many years and was a very early recycler.

The phrase “horrors from the deep” took on another significance recently, when a plastic bag was found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans, along with sweet wrappers of course. We also heard that “there ain’t no mountain high enough”, when 11,000 kg of rubbish, including plastic, was removed from Mount Everest. Still, plastic keeps fruit clean, right?

The hon. Member for Cambridge spoke of TV programmes that helped to create the increasing pressure for action. The recent disclosure that nations in other parts of the world are refusing to continue to accept waste from the UK, and plastic waste in particular, also brought that issue into the public consciousness with a bang. I am sure that many of us here muttered a wee profanity in relief as we realised that this news was being laid out clearly on the public agenda—hooray, indeed. But it must not just be a press story that is here today and gone tomorrow.

It was no surprise perhaps that we were foisting our problems on countries that we regard as “developing” while we think of ourselves as “developed”, which is to our shame; there is perhaps no surprise either that we are happy to leave it to someone else to clean up after us; and there is perhaps no surprise that we did not think about the consequences before we made the mess.

The sheer volume of waste that cannot be recycled and that represents a hazard to other life on this planet is as mind blowing as the scale of our idea that it can all simply be swept under the global carpet. The task of cleaning up this mess, and the job of getting some semblance of order back, is of similar measure to that of sending people to the moon after Kennedy made that declaration in Houston in 1962.

We need to have a similar belief in our ability to achieve. We need to think that it is not only necessary but within our reach to take action; that this action is not only possible but desirable. We have to set our collective human mind to the task of setting right what we have made wrong. I do not think that anyone has all the answers yet, but at least we have started asking the questions.

We need to clear the backlog of waste that we have created, but we also need to do more to stop creating the stuff in the first place. I find myself going backwards and forwards, between praising supermarkets—as some speakers have done, quite rightly, today for developing products and packaging that can be composted or recycled, or that are even biodegradable, which are moves in the right direction—to thinking that if those supermarkets spent a fraction of their advertising and promotion budgets on this issue, we might see some real differences.

Since each supermarket watches all the other supermarkets and twitches at the smallest possible movement, smart supermarkets that find a way to market some real moves to sustainability will not only gain a commercial advantage, which they will keep, but trigger a chain reaction in the other supermarkets. It is good to hear that the first, somewhat tentative steps are being taken in that respect and that that opportunity is finally being grasped.

However, it is not enough simply to find ways to use a bit less packaging. Where packaging is desirable or necessary, we should make sure that it does not cost the future. We must make the packaging sustainable, recyclable and biodegradable—making it properly biodegradable would be even better.

In my constituency, there is a company called Vegware, which produces foodstuffs packaging that, as can be seen by looking at this cup, people might take for plastic, but it is not. Instead, it is made from plants and can be recycled with food waste, where it composts—commercial composting, yes, but that becomes nutrients for plants. That is a virtuous circle that is simple and rather beautiful.

Vegware has been in business only since 2006, but it has operational bases in the UK, the US, Australia and Hong Kong, and it distributes throughout Europe, the middle east, South America and the Caribbean. It has corporate clients the length of the UK and, indeed, in this very Parliament. It has demonstrated onsite compositing at Dundee and Angus College that produces horticultural compost from waste in just two weeks. It is showing the way forward, and that is not unusual in Scotland, either. The Scottish Government are showing leadership within their restricted scope for movement.

I am delighted to see that the deposit return scheme is coming in Scotland. I have often wondered why there has been so much attention on plastic straws, important though that matter is, and not enough on plastic bottles—as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee mentioned—especially when we can get compostable straws from Vegware, a company in my constituency that I might have mentioned previously.

Scotland’s recycling rates are high. More trees are being planted each year and communities up and down the country are taking action. I mentioned Wardie Bay beachwatch and I will also mention the fantastic Leithers Don’t Litter, a completely voluntary organisation that has been making a huge difference for years now to the Leith community with its clean-up days. I particularly pay tribute to Gerry and Zsuzsa Farrell, who have been utter champions in that regard.

Schoolchildren have become the environmental activists that our generation failed to be, and the future is brighter than it might have been as a result. But that is not enough; much more needs to be done. Governments need to go beyond strategies, plans and visions to some actual actions, and I will be delighted to see the Minister getting on with it.