But we have plenty of other contenders for the prize of most useless and harmful consumer product. If you want to clean the surfaces of your kitchen then the product of choice is usually a chemical spray that comes in a plastic container. Since the spray part usually needs to be separated from the container these have always been hard to recycle. Now scientists have discovered much bigger problems. The first is that the spray gets into your lungs and can be as big a danger to your health as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. The scientists who discovered this noticed a much bigger impact on women’s health than on men’s – and could also trace even more serious damage on the lungs of women employed as cleaners. So much for modern men and an end to a sexist division of housework in the majority of homes! Then the scientists uncovered a second and equally horrible problem. The fine particles of the spray also get into the wider environment and it has now been found that they are contributing almost as much to air pollution in cities as car journeys. That is a staggeringly horrible fact. One daft change in our cleaning habits is killing people in two different ways and is every bit as bad for your lungs as inner city driving. Putting a bit of soap onto a cloth and wiping a surface down causes none of these problems and is cheap and easy. Yet we’ve been eased away from that simple effective approach and sold the illusion that it is somehow better and more modern to spray chemicals that can kill bacteria into the air around our homes. Things that can kill bacteria are also usually quite good at damaging lungs. We are voluntarily risking children’s health every time we clean the home. Death by consumerism!
Another of my particular pet hates is clothes washing liquid. A decade or so ago the normal purchase was a cardboard package full of washing powder. Then someone in marketing decided that they would be able to sell more if they put a liquid into a plastic bottle and convinced us all that it would make washing clothes easier and more efficient. The result is a massive increase in the use of plastic. All you have to do is to walk along the relevant aisle of a supermarket and you can see on the shelves the sheer quantity of extra plastic that this one marketing ploy creates each week. If we all returned to buying powder we’d be helping the environment enormously but that is not happening because consumers perceive it as an old-fashioned choice. It is not. It is the responsible choice.
Which is not something you can say for the ready meal. It is only a couple of years since it was discovered that many of these meals contained horsemeat and that the supply chain of the meat was so complex that the supermarkets who were selling it didn’t even know which country the food had come from. Much of the meat had been sold and resold as many as ten times. If it was so very easy to disguise horsemeat imagine how much easier it must be to disguise meat that is beyond its normal sell by date or contains higher than normal contaminants. Yet the risk of eating something you didn’t expect to is not the only problem with ready meals. It has been shown that eating large quantities of highly processed food has a high correlation with cancer, obesity, and diabetes. So there are serious health risks. There are also serious environmental problems. These meals usually come with a plastic film that can’t be recycled and they sit on plastic trays which are also usually thrown into landfill. Unless the consumer washes the tray carefully and the local council uses a very sophisticated processing plant all that packaging is going into landfill or going to be burned in an incinerator.
If you listen to a lot of people in the waste industry they will tell you that incineration is the solution to the plastic waste mountain. It isn’t. It is possible to generate energy by burning waste and that may give the impression that a nice clean solution has been created to consumerism. In truth it is physically impossible to burn economically a mixture of complex plastics of unknown origin at a high enough temperature to avoid leaving significant residues that get pumped out into the air. For many years the UK couldn’t find enough communities who would volunteer to breathe in this air so the country has coped with its waste plastic mountain by putting much of it into container ships and driving those containers to the other side of Eurasia. Effectively we’ve relied on the Chinese to dispose of the rubbish that comes from our profligate lifestyles. Now China has decided that it has had enough and the mountains of rubbish are building up.
The UK government therefore has some hard choices to make. It can delay the problem by paying a poorer country than China to take its rubbish. Not an ethical or a sustainable solution. It can build a lot more incinerators and face huge and very legitimate objections from local people who don’t want to breathe in PCBs. It can use the last of its rapidly filling land fill sites to bury the mountains of plastic that no longer have a home.
Or it can make manufacturers pay for the full social costs of the plastic they use. It can introduce plastic bottle refundable deposit charges. It can tax single use plastic. It can pay for publicity campaigns to counteract marketing of useless plastic products. It can invest in research into alternative products and help UK manufacturers become world leaders in the next wave of technology.
The Conservatives have decided that there are votes to be gained by talking about the environment. I suggest we judge the merits of their actions by looking at how many of those measures they enact. Personally I expect them to provide a lot of bluster. Many fine words. And no meaningful action.