Then China wised up and decided that it was no longer prepared to import pollution. It had quite enough of its own to deal with after reckless pursuit of growth at all costs had turned many of its rivers into lifeless sewers and every major city into an early death trap for anyone who lived in them and breathed in the air.
So you’d have thought that the UK would have taken the opportunity to think seriously about the morality of consuming so much un-necessary packaging and set about dealing with the production and use of excessive packaging by industry and by delivery businesses. Not a bit of it.
We have had a lot of positive moves from consumers. Some small and very visible changes like plastic bag charges and eventual bans on plastic straws. Yet we have had next to no actual action on imposing restrictions on what gets wrapped around your latest on line delivery and even less on making sure industry changes its production practices. Sound bites have been impressive. Actions less so.
Instead of shipping to China we have simply increased our deliveries of rubbish to Vietnam. We’ve also switched to burning it. As land fill sites have run out of space the UK has been building incinerators at speed.
Over 40 incinerators now exist that proudly proclaim that they are turning plastic waste into green energy. That is a very dangerous idea. A small number of incinerators will be required for many years to come to deal with specialist problems like some forms of medical waste. A large number creates a dependency.
The plastic packing fuelled incinerators cost a lot of money to establish and have to be kept going by a regular supply of material. You can’t easily lower the quantity of material as technology doesn’t make it cost effective or even particularly safe to suddenly turn on and off an incinerator. Once we have become reliant on the flow of materials into these newly built centres that flow has to keep coming. If there isn’t enough packaging then something else has to go in to keep up the flow.
Burning material is of course a way to create greenhouse gases. Burning plastics and items like car tyres is also a way of pushing out fumes that contain lead, arsenic, cadmium, and an eccentric and unpredictable mixture of dioxins.
With the best available technology and really well-designed incinerators a high temperature will reduce residues. No incinerator can operate commercially at a high enough temperature to destroy them. Filters are therefore fitted. No incinerator operator will give a commitment that every particle of poisonous materials that are produced will always be captured in the incinerator filters. All know that certain residues will be vented into the air in circumstances such as splits in filters.
Once in the air the problem is then where they end up. In the valley where I live there is an incinerator planned near Keighley. A poor town that has already been heavily polluted and where they thought there would be a limited number of effective protestors. How wrong they were! A long and really effective fight has been conducted which has challenged the planning permissions and the environmental licences at every stage of the process including via judicial review.
Yet the planning system is heavily weighted in favour of a developer and it is really hard to fight equally against lawyers and planning experts employed by a profitable business when all you are relying on is local volunteers and local donations. The chances are high that yet another incinerator will be built.
Once it is working and venting gases into the air those gases will rise safely up into the atmosphere. Only to sink straight back down again in winter every time there is an air inversion. There are regular air inversions in my valley and that is one of the reasons why it is an asthma hotspot.
So this is the reality of our profligate lifestyles. Watch the advert. Buy the product. Moan a bit when it arrives wrapped in a mountain of packaging. Put it in the right bin. Assume all is OK. Let the authorities ship some of it abroad. Let them bury some more. Let them burn increasing amounts of it. Breathe heavily and watch your child get ill.
It is cheap to burn rubbish and local authorities are desperately short of money. So many have jumped at the idea that they can send their rubbish to an incinerator and not have to find a new burial site or work harder at sorting rubbish collections. Unless they get serious new money from central government soon this country is going to become steadily more dependent on new incinerators that will need to run for 20 years or so to pay back financial investments. Not one penny of new money has been squeezed out by Michael Gove from the Chancellor for waste disposal. Rather the reverse. Local authorities have lost 60p in every pound of their funding over a ten year period.
They used to say that “where there’s muck – there’s money”. The reality now is rather different. There is plenty of muck. But the money to clean it up properly is strangely absent!