Alison Kemp, technical director at Wardell Armstrong, says the current “groundswell” of awareness around plastic and environmental issues needs to be partnered with education.
When attending a conference this month, I was disappointed to see that plastic water bottles for delegates had been replaced with Tetra Pak cartons. The branding on the carton states ‘One less bottle’ which is apparently jumping on the bandwagon of avoiding single use plastic and presenting itself as a more environmentally conscious choice.
To me, this seems like a knee jerk reaction, and in the drive to reduce single use plastic, the alternative being marketed has not been fully considered environmentally.
There is a groundswell of movement to reduce plastic use, influenced heavily by media coverage of ocean plastic. There are a lot of great projects that have gained momentum as a result of the increased awareness, for example the Refill revolution.
It would be hard for anyone to argue that in most cases, there is significant environmental benefit to reducing single use plastic, however, the priority to avoiding single use plastic, should ultimately be avoiding single use anything.
It would be hard for anyone to argue that in most cases, there is significant environmental benefit to reducing single use plastic, however, the priority to avoiding single use plastic, should ultimately be avoiding single use anything.
Both the plastic and Tetra Pak options in this example ultimately contribute to the wider waste problem, and don’t go far enough to address a reduction in consumption and resource use. At the conference, delegates could have been provided with glasses that can be filled (and re-filled).
There are a lot of places and events where reduction and reuse is being promoted over single use. However, it is also clear that the drive to reduce single use plastic is fuelling a raft of companies, who, in an attempt to respond quickly to the momentum, put products on the market that might not have been fully considered and risk to actually do more environmental damage than the plastic original.
They are often branded as a more ecofriendly choice, and due to the raised awareness, both individuals and businesses are keen to make (and be seen to be making) a difference, and so can easily get swept away with this marketing.
While feeling that they are making a more environmentally conscious choice, and potentially promoting that choice to others, they could actually be inadvertently adding to the spiral of damage that this initial knee jerk reaction is causing.
I completely agree that offering conference delegates individual plastic water bottles should be avoided. However, I don’t think that replacing them with a product that is equally single use should have been the response. I estimate that this one-day, small scale event probably generated ~ 500 empty Tetra Pak bottles.
Investing in development
I commend the conference organisers for attempting to introduce an alternative, and I hope they were being collected for recycling, but a significant amount of avoidable waste was still generated. Like the plastic bottle, Tetra Pak can be recycled.
Nevertheless, the energy and water consumed to both create and recycle a Tetra Pak container is significant, and not all regions (~50%) offer Tetra Pak recycling at the kerbside, and so the chance of it being put in a residual bin is arguably higher than with a plastic bottle.
Tetra Pak has a number of attributes, but in this example, doesn’t appear to add any benefit over and above the plastic original, aside from not being plastic. Although even that isn’t entirely true, as Tetra Pak includes the plastic (polyethylene) layer.
This is a great time to be investing in developing new and improved alternatives, but they need to be well considered
This is one isolated example, but is likely to be one of many, and there is a danger that with the intention of promoting products as plastic alternatives, we are, in some cases, actually doing more environmental damage than good.
This is a great time to be investing in developing new and improved alternatives, but they need to be well considered, and full lifecycle assessments have to be undertaken to ensure that they really are less environmentally damaging than single use plastic, and ideally, significantly more environmentally beneficial.
Coverage and policy, has, to date, been largely focused on discussing the need to avoid single use plastic. These messages around resource use, littering and damage to wildlife have been widely and well publicised. However, I think it is important that we also focus on providing people with constructive suggestions and solutions.
The groundswell of awareness therefore needs to be partnered with education of both the public and businesses so that they are armed with the information to enable and empower them to make more considered choices and to question the branding when it tells them that a product is a more environmentally friendly option.
This will inevitably form part of the wider debate about packaging, and behaviour may ultimately be heavily influenced by changes to policies and legislation. When more emphasis is placed on the responsibility of the producer, it is hoped, coupled with greater accessibility to information, that the developing, sourcing and utilising of more circular alternatives will become commonplace.