Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. I thank her for securing this debate and setting out many important points.
As the noble Baroness said, we are up to our necks in plastic. In 2020 the previous Government banned plastic straws, stirrers, spoons and cotton buds, but that is nothing to be proud of—it is like trying to use a toothbrush to clean up the planet. It is easy to hold the previous Government at fault for the failure to progress plastic recycling, whether on the slow progress on reducing the use of plastic packaging, on optimising the design of packaging for recycling, on domestic collection, on domestic recycling provision or on the failure to regulate the Wild West of exporting materials for so-called recycling. Indeed, I do hold the previous Government responsible. I meet so many people who ask, “What happened to the bottle deposit scheme?”. Quite a few still remember the £20,000 donation from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association to the Conservative Party just before it used the internal market Act to kill Scotland’s well-advanced scheme.
While this is a long story of regulatory failure—not to mention the underfunding of the local authorities that have to deal with the mess created by giant multinational companies profiting from the use of dangerously toxic, polluting materials—there is a more fundamental problem on which I want to focus. Plastics are a material that simply do not fit within the model of a circular economy, which is of course an absolute necessity if we are to live within the boundaries of this terribly fragile, terribly poisoned, planet.
Glass can be recycled indefinitely, steel can be recycled indefinitely, aluminium can be recycled indefinitely and even paper can be recycled five to seven times. Plastic, however, can effectively only be downcycled. Even to get to that, plastics have to be sorted by colour and type, washed and shredded up. These processes burn large amounts of fossil fuel, produce waste—including large quantities of the microplastics and nanoplastics that are now polluting all our bodies—and contaminate water. Then they are most often turned into items of lesser value and quality; for example, plastic water bottles go to fleece jackets or carpet fibre. Why is that? It is because newly made plastic can have some 16,000 different chemicals added to it. Used plastic can have residues of pesticide, biocides, pharmaceuticals and other toxic chemicals, so when it is used for food purposes, it is usually mixed with virgin plastics to dilute the toxicity.
I point noble Lords to a study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials in 2022, which showed how antimony and well-known endocrine-disrupting chemicals, notably bisphenol A, migrate out of particularly recycled PET drink bottles into the products that they contain. We might want to think about how long even those downcycling possibilities will be around. As our understanding of the human and environmental health threat posed by microplastics and nanoplastics grows, who will want to wear a jacket shedding plastics into the air around their nose and mouth? Who will want to have their baby crawling over a plastic carpet, breathing in all the toxins and fibres that it is producing?
That is on the individual scale; to go back to the planetary scale, we have choked the planet with more than 10 billion tonnes of toxic plastic. About 460 million tonnes of plastic are being produced annually, and the fossil fuel merchants are aiming to treble that by 2050, as the market for their products as a fuel fast fades away. I therefore ask the Minister: what are the Government going to do, domestically and diplomatically, to stop this taking of carbon out of the very long-term storage in which nature put it and eventually, inevitably, pumping it into our already overheated air? This is something that has only been magnified by the new wheeze of so-called “advanced recycling”—sometimes called chemical recycling. There is nothing advanced about using heat or chemicals to melt down plastic to downcycle it into petrochemical products that are very likely to be burned as more dirty fossil fuel energy.
It is time to focus on the producers of this toxic material, and I would ask the Government to do so. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, spoke about educating consumers but, very often, consumers have no escape but to buy items in plastic—and that is the responsibility of the producers and retailers, not the consumers. I note a report from the Center for Climate Integrity from 2024, which lists the number of lies from plastic companies over decades, claiming that their products are recyclable and not harmful.
I finish by looking at both ends of the plastic journey. Two years ago, a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, highlighted the damage done by just one of the many toxic materials that go into making plastics—generally in poorer communities. At the other end, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said, it is going to global South countries where people are being poisoned.
When we look at the waste pyramid, recycling is a very poor solution. It is the third choice; it should be used only when reducing the use of material or reusing products has proved absolutely impossible, not when it is slightly less convenient or slightly less profitable—when it is simply not possible. That means that the vast majority of the plastic products on our retail shelves today should not be there. We should not be looking to recycle them; we should be looking to get rid of them. What are the Government going to do to get us to that crucial goal?