When was the last time you went a whole week without generating any plastic waste? By my reckoning, this is now nigh on impossible in the UK. The world today is awash with the stuff and the consumer faces the prospect of getting rid of it at every given turn. This is the problem.
In terms of recycling facilities for plastic, the UK is poor. How can we reasonably expect the average householder to recycle all their plastic if there is no facility or incentive to do so. One thing is clear - it is not an option to just keep on throwing it in to land-fill. One of the biggest problems with land-fill is that it is always out of sight and so, by inference, out of mind.
This is a huge problem which successive governments seem reluctant to address. The growing dominance of the big supermarkets has contributed in no small part to this growth. Up until recently, a sole green grocer fought against the might of three supermarkets in the town where I live. It was one of those old style green grocers which had its produce displayed in neat tubs below mirrors. You picked your own produce, weighed it according to how much you needed and placed it in to a brown paper bag ready to pay for it. Sadly, that greengrocer is no more because the perceived convenience of the supermarket has won the day. For the most part, supermarkets offer us produce in plastic containers of a pre-determined weight. We are quite happy to be dictated to by them which contributes in no small part to the obscene amounts of food waste which we generate weekly.
What would happen if the government were to impose a tax on plastic containers? The Welsh government has already imposed a tax on plastic bags. In the Principality, you have to pay 5 pence if you require a plastic bag. Consequently, the number of plastic bags being used has plummeted. It is widely thought that if supermarkets were taxed on the excessive amounts of packaging which they impose on us, they would simply pass the cost on to us. The example of plastic bags in Wales appears to confound this theory. The only reason so much is thrown away at present is because there is hardly any alternative.
A new plastic packaging tax allied to a radical increase in the number of recycling facilities would drastically reduce the amount of natural resource being thrown away. Perhaps many people are indifferent to the extent to which it pervades their lives but I just don't understand how we have come to accept waste on such a massive scale.
In 1969, the Kinks released a song called "Plastic Man". The kings of English whimsical social comment were seeking to break out of the doldrums since their commercially unsuccessful album "Village Green Preservation Society" in 1968. The song sought to mock the growing trend towards using plastic and the central character was a plastic loving man whose children all wanted to emulate him. Even being banned by the BBC didn't do it much good. Normally, a BBC ban is as near to a guarantee of commercial success as you could wish for. It was banned, believe it or not, for the line "And plastic legs which reach up to his plastic bum". It seems then that just as the Kinks failed to get the message across in 1969, we still seem to be struggling with this inert nuisance in 2013.
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