Don’t ‘virtue signal’ on plastic – it’s not always the enemy

If you’re anything like our household, you will have had the ‘plastic bin’ discussion. What can and can’t go in? What does the logo mean? How clean does it need to be? It doesn’t help that there is, seemingly, a different recycling policy for every postcode.

Then, after all your earnest attempts to sort and separate your recyclables, figures reveal that only 17% of all plastic waste in the UK is actually recycled, while 58% is incinerated and 14% exported to other countries. The remaining 11% is sent to landfill [Greenpeace].

In theory, we can sort through and recycle about 90% of all plastics using standard mechanical recycling works. So why aren’t we?

A lot of the recycling problem comes down to economics, not lack of knowhow. Virgin plastic is cheap to make and, therefore, the cost of recycling is hard to justify. So, for recycling to work, who is going to pay for it? Consumers, manufacturers, government intervention? Or do we simply boycott plastics?

Consumers are already on board in the war on plastic, leaving retailers and manufacturers desperate to create alternatives to appease them.

However, as Dr Chris DeArmitt, a renowned plastic materials scientist, has stated: “There are numerous full lifecycle studies showing that in 93% of packaging cases, plastic is the option with the smallest environmental impact.”

Therefore, are we simply jumping on the plastic hate train and, in some cases, allowing consumers to virtue signal?

For example, the carbon footprint of both paper bags and glass bottles are higher than their plastic alternatives, as they are much heavier to transport and take more energy to create. A recent revelation for me was finding out that the plastic sleeve on a cucumber (which I despised) increases their life threefold, enabling them to not spoil on the shipment from Europe to the UK. Removing the sleeve would require three times more cucumbers to be grown and shipped, resulting in a bigger carbon footprint.

Of course, I am not advocating freely using plastic. We must end the creation of cheap, useless tat and explore how to improve our recycling rates. But we must make sure we fully understand the implications of our actions and always explore the alternatives – not just do what looks green or lean into the status quo.