Plastic bags & supermarkets

[ParaHandy]

It appals me and I cringe every time I hear what’s being accomplished – presumably willingly and sincerely – in the UK by the green lobby and those, like the Daily Mail, who sincerely believe they’re doing their bit for the environment.

The horse bolted out the stable door a long time ago …

In the late 80’s the draft European Waste Directive appeared and, here in the UK, the gov brought a quango together, the Packaging Producers Responsibility Group (PPRG). This group, headed by Sir Peter Parker late of British Rail and the tilting train and chairman of Rockware who, along with UG Glass and Redfern were the country’s three largest glass producers, was to determine how the various industries involved would pay for the waste each generated.

You might wonder why the group’s objective was so determined. Might it have leaped over or ignored a recovery strategy and gone straight for a crude system of divvying up the cost of packaging waste? After all, the UK had a long and stable recovery system for packaging whether it be milk bottles, lemonade bottles, cardboard and newsprint. But that was before the growth of our supermarkets which I calculate took off in the late 70s.

After Edward Heath’s 3 day week and the Arab-Israeli wars, the vulnerability of glass manufacture to energy costs lead to an explosion in the growth of plastics. Glass was receiving a very bad press from either louts in Glasgow tenements and elsewhere returning their milk empties directly from the top storey or using them as weapons. However, the one barrier to milk going into plastic was the efficiency of the existing milk distribution system and the efforts of the glass industry to reduce the weight of the bottle. The prize in moving to non-returnable milk packaging was considerable; with such a staple commodity available in a supermarket, it would draw business in for every other product. Eventually, the government agreed a subsidy for each milk carton – I forget the exact reasons why, but it happened and about 1979 – and the door swung wide open for the supermarkets. The consequences are well known; liquid milk consumption fell because the housewife now purchased sufficient and no more. Supermarkets began to plan the exact position of where fresh milk was to be sold in each store to guarantee that the customer had to pass what they most wanted to sell. With the ball rolling, soft drinks was ultimately easily and similarly captured. The key word, which slipped in without anyone appearing to notice, was non-returnable. The supermarkets flatly refused to return anything; it was dirty. Collection and recovery became somebody else’s problem. It seems, now, extraordinary that the existing example of an industry which dealt with its own waste was just ignored. A plastic milk bottle is equivalent to a dozen or more plastic bags. Nobody, certainly not in government, gave any thought to what was going to happen to trillions of plastic milk bottles except for one council – Milton Keynes.

Their, Milton Keynes, example is interesting as it illustrates the indifference we had. In Australia, a very determined group decided to recycle PET bottles from the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne area (an area bigger than the UK) and developed an extraction process similar to how gold is extracted by ore flotation. In this case the extract was the cap and the label leaving the PET as bottom residue but the labels proved to be much more difficult until Coke and Pepsi were convinced of the sensibility of changing the glue which adhered the label to a water-based glue. No such banging of heads ever occurred in the UK with dire consequences for the purity of MK’s output.

At that time, the Dutch, Germans and much of mainland Europe viewed the Directive with a certain smug pleasure. They expected to meet the Directive with little or no additional effort. Continental supermarkets had whinged at having to collect such articles but were told by their governments to get on with it. The Dutch had a 1 guilder deposit on a bottle of lemonade which Tesco were selling for 55p. The USA had a similar scheme which wasn’t state wide and which gave rise to Al Capon-like activities on the federal borders between New Jersey and Pennsylvania with trucks of empties heading across state borders.

The PPRG duly divvy’d up the costs with the retailer bearing the greatest burden but, by a rather peculiar quirk, each packaging waste stream (eg plastic, cardboard, aluminium etc) which had been given its own recovery targets, was allowed to count any waste as “recovered wasteâ€

[BigNick]

An interesting (ish) professional view, Para, but one wonders what we have to do going forward to manage the situation better.

[Nick]

.
Para, that is as BigNick says very interesting, but what brought it on? Have I missed another introduction of a 'bag tax'?

I agree that trying to reduce the number of plastic carriers may be pi**ing into the wind, but it's a tiny step. OK, so in Ireland it has led to a huge increase in paper waste as shops switch to paper bags, but even so . . .

You are of course correct though, the whole overpackaged non-returnable culture we find ourselves in has been driven by the expansion of supermarkets. The corollary is that only the supermarkets can make a real impact on our domestic waste problems.

What I don't understand is why the government are so reluctant to take Tescos et al on . . . it's not as if they are all going to pull out of Britain at the first sign of a bit of sensible legislation.

[ljs]

Interesting and perceptive, apropos whatever. But as he says, we are where we are.

[ParaHandy]

An interesting (ish) professional view, Para, but one wonders what we have to do going forward to manage the situation better.

There were (at least) 3 key determinants: there had to be a market, the technical difficulties of product transmission and collection.

20 years ago Germany tried to force the market by creating a recycling content which, without coincidentally creating the market, resulted in thousands of tonnes of recovered but unusable plastics being shipped to China or dumped.

There is now a market; oil at $100 has made, at least on the continent, processing economic and the product marketable. In Australia, PET recycling was very nearly stopped 15 years ago because Coke considered that using recycled material hadn't sold a single extra coke bottle and couldn't justify the cost. That cost input would probably no longer be required.

The second issue was the danger of noxious chemicals leaching into the sidewall of a plastic container and then transferring itself to the product inside a recycled container. This has now been solved although I don't quite know how (probably by re-extrusion and pelletising). In Australia & the US, the recycled material was a co-injected layer inside virgin polymer but that complex process is no longer required. PCR is nowadays converted on an almost like for like basis with virgin polymer.

The third issue is collection. It doesn't matter where in the world you look, you will always find that a packaging deposit system guarantees very high recovery. However, UK government policy towards supermarkets is scarred by the public's perception that they are either profiteering, putting farmers out of business, the cause of binge drinking amongst juveniles and so on, ad infinitum. Its almost as if every ill of today is piled at their door. This atmosphere is not conducive to a hard, productive and effective solution which will fix the problem. What we don't want are initiatives such as the plastic bag; they consume energy and deflect attention from where the real problem lies.

In all likelihood, the decisions supermarkets made many years ago to refuse to collect are not even relevant today. That is what is so stupid.

[Silkie]

Would you be in favour of the consumer having the right to reject packaging at the point of purchase with the retailer being required to recycle it?

[claymore]

Apparently Para has been excluded from a number of Marks and Spencer stores because of his penchant for lingerie.

It's just his way of having a pop.

Interestingly I've recently seen people on Blackpool Beach collecting their doggiedoos in plastic bags and them hoicking them into the sea. Oh dear!

[jim.r]

I think an important fact has been omitted in this analysis. ie the number of plastic bags that are cut into strips and knitted into nethergarments by the more economy minded of us. I have in fact knitted an ientire spinnaker out of old tesco bags .. and very fine it is too .. bit baggy though ..

[BigNick]

well, it cant look any worse than that blue one with red advertising all over it!

But to be serious, as I understand it, many clothes made from sythentic fibres are from recycled material. So a 90quid fleece from Musto was once a number of plastic milk bottles or whatever.

so to get over the costs and risks which Para mentions, in recycling bottles back into new bottles, why not just use the materials for something else.

Similarly, where they have been repaving much of the pavements around Southwark, I notice they are using ground down glass instead of fresh sand to bed the slabs down.

[ParaHandy]

the number of plastic bags that are cut into strips and knitted into nethergarments ... out of old tesco bags ..

i would use Waitrose bags ma'sel for such a critical application ... although Sainsbury's coloured bags would hide ony skid marks erm ...

[ParaHandy]

Would you be in favour of the consumer having the right to reject packaging at the point of purchase with the retailer being required to recycle it?

Not a good idea .. some years ago a fruit grower up these parts (Blairgowrie) lost his crop for some reason and to comply with a supermarket contract secured a tanker of it from France. The product was typical French Bon Maman but was useless without a huge addition of preservative. Tesco et al have a distribution system which although highly efficient depends on central collection and distribution points which inevitably extends the time between manufacture and sale. Thus the product has to survive for relatively much longer periods (than continental European supermarkets) and thus requires preservative.

The taste suffers, of course.

The packaging used by supermarkets with all its clever technology eg nitrogen dosing is essential to survive this system.

Once you disrupt this system, which when all is said and done produces a cheaper product, there will be unintended consequences for all.

[claymore]

Jings Para... ra faitherorabridie speech not going too well today then?

Think I just called the daughter a pie - please accept my sincere apologies

[jim.r]

Acshully, how does he know he's ra faither o' ra bride, Ah'd want a DNA test masell before splashing oot on ra weddin'

[Olivepage]

On the subject of plastic carrier bags

How do you open the damned things?

SWMBO piles stuff onto the checkout, the little girl waves them about until something goes "peep"

And muggins is at the end trying to open the bloody bag whose sides are araldited together.

All the time tins and packets are piling up and the little girl is giving me dirty looks cos she can't make her machine beep cos there are packets of spaghetti stuck on the beepy bit and SWMBO is snarling at me cos she's got half a cwt of spuds in her hand and nowhere to put it. And the 47 people queuing behind her are stamping their feet and rattling their trolleys

AND ITS ALL MY FAULT

I hate supermarkets

We used to have Tesco deliver the stuff, but last time the driver tried to reverse out of the drive and got his van stuck in the field opposite and I had to pull him out. Even had to use my own rope. It was of course pissing it down at the time. SWMBO said she wouldn't have that again, - and it was my fault for not warning the driver - and I put muddy footprints on the carpet - and I should have put my wellies on first.

I have a hard life.

[chakalo]

OP you grumpy 'ol sod. In the nearest supermarket to me all the till girls are young blonde Poles, all earning in one day what they normally earn in a fortnight. "Would you like 'elp wiz zer packin'? " they ask, all smiling nicely.

I have bought a "green" ever lasting bag 'cos I too can't get the stoopid bags open....