Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Martin Whitfield Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Martin Whitfield (East Lothian) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) and to hear of the changes that are coming to the House over the next year.

Plastics help to make a wide range of very useful, durable, versatile products, and, in their own way, they do contribute to sustainability. Thanks to plastic, our shampoo bottles do not shatter in the shower when they are dropped, our cars and trucks weigh less and therefore use less fuel, and our homes are better insulated and save energy. We ship more goods with less packaging than ever before. However, as we have heard today, and I think that we all agree, plastics come with an environmental cost. None of us wants to see the plastics, or trash of any kind, end up in our countryside, our water courses and eventually our oceans. To challenge this end-of-pipe problem, plastics organisations from around the world have joined together in “The Declaration of Global Plastics Association for the Solutions on Marine Litter”, which is informally known as the global declaration. That was completed in 2011 and, unfortunately, up to now only 75 plastics organisations and allied industries, which represent more than 40 countries, have voluntarily signed up to it. There was a commitment contained in that to take action and, more importantly, to make measurable progress.

I draw the attention of the House to Net-Works, an organisation in the central Philippines, which deals with recycling ghost fishing nets taken from the oceans; the plastic straw product stewardship scheme in the US and north America; and, indeed, Upcycling the Oceans, the Thailand project to rehabilitate the coastlands by removing the waste from the oceans. I also wish to draw Members’ attention to the UK’s contribution to this declaration, which is called Operation Clean Sweep. In East Lothian, the charity Fidra is championing plastic waste awareness. It often ran campaigns in the past about plastic straws and it is now concentrating on nurdles.

Nurdles are the small plastic pellets that are used to make the plastic bottles, the coffee cups, and the objects that we see. Nurdles are, in essence, raw plastic, and the problem is how they are transported around the world. Sadly, an astronomically large number of these nurdles escape during this process, and end up in our oceans. Like microbeads, once they are in our oceans, they are almost impossible to take out. Indeed, Fidra has used beach clean-ups to raise awareness among children. When schoolchildren went on a nurdle hunt at Yellowcraig, a particularly beautiful beach in East Lothian, they discovered 400 nurdles in just five minutes. It is a phenomenal amount to be washed up on our beaches, and industrial spillage and mishandling is the cause of this nurdle escape. The nurdles then float and travel around the world.

Operation Clean Sweep seeks to educate industry to provide ways and strategies to reduce the loss and escape of these nurdles, but, again, this is an end-of-pipe product. It is before the plastic gets into our chains that we need to look. This in turn brings me to the types of plastic that we use. We should move to a mandated minimum use of rPET content in plastic objects. PET is an acronym for polyethylene terephthalate, which makes up plastic, and when it is recycled it becomes rPET. Is it too much to hope that products such as coffee cups and water bottles could contain at least 50% rPet by, say, 2020?

Plastic cups are the end product of a process that many good people, charities businesses and organisations are trying to make sustainable and reusable. I am thinking of the lobster hatchery in North Berwick, founded by Jane McMinn, Davis Grubb and Jack Dale who see our oceans not as a dumping ground, but as an opportunity for sustainable inshore fishing. Indeed, the award-winning Seabird Centre in East Lothian sees the results of oceanic plastic pollution miles and miles from these shores. These are the people who are advocating responsibility.

However, our young people and our volunteer groups and charities will not be enough without political and, if necessary, legislative support. The EU is promoting the target of 2030 as the year by which member states should have phased out single-use plastics. The UK Government’s proposal of a 25-year environment plan appears to be, with all due respect, more of a repackaging of existing policies and previous announcements. I sincerely hope that the repackaging is not in plastic.

It is our children who go to the beach clean-ups, and our surfers who use our water. Through the conduit of the plastic whale, which was mentioned earlier, and the nurdle hunts, these people attack the issue with passion, enthusiasm and commitment, but those young people now who are cleaning beaches will be in their 30s by the time these Government policies come in. We owe them more than that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Sobel]

For the record, I did say shiploads—boatloads of materials. Zero Waste Vietnam is a very proper organisation; it would not resort to any foul language. In that case, a local organisation presented us with evidence that the plastic that we are exporting may not actually be recycled. That is the point of these export recovery notes.

[Martin Whitfield]

One of the great challenges of recycling is that the bottles and containers are often dirty when they go into system, and thus pollute whole loads. One of the great behavioural changes that we need to adopt is the ability to clean these containers ourselves before we submit them to be recycled.

[Alex Sobel]

We certainly do not want to see boatloads of dirty waste, so I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We also need a complete audit of our PERN system and should look at reform. If we are to export plastic, which I do not actually agree with, we need to know that it will be recycled when it arrives at its destination.

Although the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) is not in his place, I want to thank him. I have a copy of his letter, which I read carefully this morning. The recommendations of the Administration Committee are not only recommendations for this House; they are recommendations that the Government should consider and which present a holistic approach to tackling the use of plastic. The letter mentions ending sales of plastic water bottles. It also includes the latte levy, which we will not have outside this place, but we will have here. The Committee proposes that we incentivise the use of reusable cups through loyalty rewards and that we get rid of condiment sachets. I was amazed to read how much sauce we eat in this place. We consume 334,800 sachets of sauce a year; we are a saucy lot in this House. I thank the Administration Committee and hope that the Government take on some of its saucy suggestions.