Plastic bags & supermarkets
Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 7:01 pm
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€
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€
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.