Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Justine Greening Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening (Putney) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to contribute to this afternoon’s debate, because its subject matters hugely to my constituents, who have the River Thames running through their community. I echo the points made by the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) and pay tribute to the work of her Environmental Audit Committee, which has led the way in this discussion over recent years. As she says, we have come a long way.

I remember writing to all the major coffee houses in Southfields just two years ago to ask them to trial a latte levy locally, which I felt the community would have welcomed, but none of them was interested. I remember writing to every single major supermarket in Southfields to ask whether they would trial reducing plastic packaging and allowing people to bring their own containers into the stores instead of having to purchase food and groceries in unnecessary packaging. Again, I was met with stony silence. However, the tide is turning in favour of all such companies stepping up to the plate and starting to innovate.

As a local MP, I launched the Putney plastic pledge initiative, which is about the community coming together to see what we can do to reduce our plastic usage. We have had a fantastic response from shops and businesses, and the Putney business improvement district has been involved. Waitrose has also taken part in the pledge, and I thank it for its efforts. Other parts of the community have been involved, including the local pubs. Young’s brewery is a fantastic local business that runs many of our pubs, and on boat race day it took the step of switching away from disposable plastic glasses for the first time. The reusable plastic glasses can be used not just in Putney on boat race day, but down in Wimbledon for the tennis tournament. The individual actions that businesses are taking will make a big difference over time.

The Putney plastic pledge has gone well beyond that, however, and the University of Roehampton is now considering what it can do to cut down its plastic usage. It has a fantastic record on sustainability, and the students are showing some leadership—I regularly try to get a wonderful latte at the Growhampton café. I also pay tribute to our local schools. At the end of last year, children from the Hotham Primary School council asked me what we are doing about plastics after having seen “Blue Planet II”, and that inspired me to think about what I could do to pull the community together to do more. Schools are now setting about cutting back on their plastic usage. Southmead Primary School has designed a logo for the pledge, and I will be visiting Riversdale Primary School in Southfields tomorrow to see some of the work that it has been doing.

So many of our actions look to the future and aim to protect the environment in which we want the next generation to become adults. Such issues have really captured their imagination and, as much as anything else, showing that this Parliament and Government are responding to their priorities is one of the most important aspects of this whole effort.

As I said at the beginning, this issue particularly matters to my local community. There is sometimes a sense that people who live in the city are somehow less interested in the environment, but nothing could be further from the truth. We really value our environment in my local community, because we know we need to take care of it. We have the River Thames right on our doorstep, and we have the wonderful Wandsworth Park just next door and then Richmond Park. I go running every week on Wimbledon Common. Protecting our environment is hugely important to us, which is why we had a clean-up on the day after the boat race—the hon. Member for Wakefield talked about how much of a problem we have with plastics in our oceans and rivers. Many of the items we cleaned up were cotton buds and plastic bags—the sorts of things that were never going to degrade, so it needed a human to pick them up and take them away, which is what we did.

We have a long way to go on this, and I thoroughly support the hon. Lady’s challenge to business. Business can really be the innovator in helping all of us be able to cut down, and I would like businesses, particularly supermarkets, to allow consumers more choice so they can more actively choose whether they want packaging by allowing them to take in their own containers. There has to be a way around some of the health and safety laws that seem to get in the way of that being possible.

We must continue to learn from behavioural change. I have to admit that I was delighted when we introduced the 5p levy on plastic bags, but I have quite a lot of bags for life in my kitchen—probably more than I will need over the course of my life. We need to recognise that we are all on a journey in changing our behaviour, and research could inform the next step after the plastic bag levy to cut down on people like me having far too many bags for life.

My community really cares about the environment. The issue of plastics has been a galvaniser for Government and is one of the things we care about in our environment in Putney. Issues such as air pollution and noise pollution, and the impact they have on public health, matter to us just as much. If the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs could apply his almost religious zeal on plastics to noise pollution and air pollution, we would be even more delighted with the progress that is being made.