And they are very small indeed. We were also told this week that tests were undertaken on the contents of human beings excrement and it was found that every single person had microplastic particles that have passed through their guts. You and I must therefore take it for granted that our own bodies contain plastic right now. From many different sources. Most of it hopefully inert and relatively harmless. But we simply don’t know the long term impact on our health of consuming plastic particles continually throughout our lives.
We do know some of the impacts on creatures that live in the sea or off seafood. Most creatures that eat jellyfish have clear plastic bags in their stomachs. The kind that you can find casually provided for free in most supermarkets so that you can wrap your vegetables. So turtles are being starved to make shopping a tiny fraction more convenient. Most predatory plankton species have no way of distinguishing between microplastics and their normal food. Plankton is the base of the food chain for most ocean life. We release millions of microplastics every time we clean our teeth.
Microplastics are also entering the soil. With little or no research into the impact on the billions of soil organisms that all agriculture depends on. It has taken humanity a little over 100 years to produce a layer of plastics that now covers the entire globe. There is no method for removing that layer from the environment. What is out there now is going to be eaten for centuries.
The only things we can do about plastics are to start producing and using less of them and to start disposing of them more sensitively. When it comes to disposal for a generation the policy of the UK has been to put enormous quantities of our rubbish into ships and sail it across the world to China so that they could dispose of it there.
Not surprisingly the Chinese have finally realised that this is not something they want to carry on doing. Naively I thought this would mean that the UK would improve its own disposal arrangements and a lot more cash would go to local authorities to support better recycling arrangements. How wrong can you be. The UK government has chosen instead to simply ship that rubbish to different countries. Our rubbish is now going to Vietnam and India instead of China. No doubt they will be overjoyed to notice that there has been a miniscule reduction in the quantity of British waste that is polluting their country because of the ban on plastic straws. They might have more cause to be grateful to us if we sorted out our own problems and stopped sending them our trash.
Radically reducing the amount of plastic we use can’t just be achieved via public pressure. It needs government action to help manufacturers to do both the easy things like changing their packaging and the hard things like removing plastic from their products on a rapid but realistic timescale. That is an immense challenge because plastic components are in virtually everything we consume and it took 100 years for that dominance to become industry standard practice. We don’t have 100 years to remove that dominance and live more lightly on the planet. With current production techniques the world is expected to consume more plastic materials in the next 20 years than it has in all previous history.
We also need government action to radically change our entire waste management system. At the moment most councils expect businesses to pay for disposal of rubbish even if it is recycled. One obvious result of this is flytipping. That whole equation needs to be reversed. Local government needs to be financed to pay people to bring used items to them and it needs to be accepted that a loss may be made on processing wastes separately and efficiently but that doing so is a vital public service. The cost of financing this needs to come from taxes on such things as the price of plastic packaging.
At the moment in Britain roughly as much of what we throw away is being burnt in incinerators as is being recycled. Much is made of the little bit of energy this generates. Little is said about the impossibility of ensuring no pollutants enter the air and the negative impact on global warming. With current technology things are disposed of that have to either be burnt or buried. That is not an excuse for building more incinerators and congratulating ourselves for powering a village or two via burnt plastic. It is an incentive to change current technology and stop producing plastics that have to be burnt.
To give Mr Gove his due he has made a number of speeches that indicates that he is well aware of the need for change. His problem is that he thinks what is needed is a minor adjustment to an otherwise successful system. He hasn’t any understanding of the depth of change to that system which is necessary if we are going to steer society away from its addiction to plastic.
Indeed, we have a pretty clear idea of where his priorities lie. His government announced with great pride recently that they were launching a new “green week”. It just so happened that this was also exactly the same week that the go ahead was given to start fracking again in Lancashire!
That was typical of this government. Large amounts of spin about how green they are. Small amounts of positive action. Some very major negative actions and a lot of neglect. Hardly a comprehensive or effective strategy.