Thinking about plastic.

 Time for a little rant about plastic, I think. 

The French yoghurt company Danone (cue for a little Mmmm, Danone - how we are influenced by advertising!!) is being taken to court by environmental groups because it has not sufficiently reduced its plastic footprint. Of course it’s not just yogurt pots as the company also seems to own Evian and Volvic who produce masses of plastic bottles of water. Apparently France has a law, dating back to 2017 which makes it mandatory to carry out monitoring of human rights and environmental concerns within large French companies and their supply chains. How very forward thinking of France to have such a law. It doesn’t seem to have gone far enough, however, if environmental groups still feel the need to sue Danone. 

Personally, I think Coca-Cola is the company that needs suing for its over-use of plastic. Time to bring back the classic, iconic, returnable glass bottle! And then I read that Coca-Cola, along with Danone, Pepsi and Nestlé, is one of the world’s acknowledged top ten plastic polluters.

Every so often we go out on litter-picking walks, armed with our handy litter-picker on a stick and a plastic carrier bag. Yes, a plastic carrier bag but we do try to use the biodegradable ones. We always pick up a fair selection of plastic bottles. There are also cans and glass bottles along with other assorted mess that people just throw out of their car windows. I’m assuming it’s mostly thrown out of car windows although I suspect that quite a lot is dropped by people walking around too - I almost said “dropped by teenagers” but realised that such a suggestion is stereotyping young people and many of them are very good environmentalists. 

Anyway, yesterday I caught a snatch of a radio news broadcast where some government representative was actually defending plastic, within certain limits of course. One of her points was the stuff other than drinks that we buy in plastic bottles: cleaning fluids, washing up liquid, shampoo and conditioner, and bleach. Imagine having that last item in your bag of shopping, she suggested, and the bleach is in a glass bottle. Something happens - maybe you drop your shopping bag or maybe someone bangs into you violently - and your glass bottle breaks, spilling bleach all over your shopping! It’s a factor to be taken into consideration!

We’ve all come to rely on plastic so much. Almost every household has a cupboard full of what we have come to refer to as “tupperware”, even though on our case much of it is plastic ice-cream boxes, used and re-used to store leftovers. The advent of plastic in our kitchens was a boon that cannot be denied. And even those of us who are desperately trying to reduce our use of throw-away plastic can still find ourselves taking some “tupperware” with us to carry our purchases home when we buy fresh fish, for example, at the market.

It’s hard, if not almost impossible, to live plastic-free!

Another factor that I’ve not heard mentioned in campaigns for reducing plastic use is the modern mania to be eating and drinking on the streets. At some point I must do a kind of straw poll. Maybe nest time I go to Manchester centre, for example, I’ll do a count of how many people walk along Market Street with a coffee in hand, many of them in throwaway cups. And there’s all the street food that people munch as they move along. 

Fish and chip shops are being encouraged not to hand put plastic forks for people to use. The odd thing is that when we used to eat fish and chips on the go, walking home from university at the end of an evening, for example, we used our fingers instead of forks. I like to think we disposed of the packaging - old newspapers rather than expanded polystyrene - in litter bins rather than in someone’s garden hedge. But the problem now is that many people eat on the street at any hour of the day. My mother would be having a hissy fit if she were still around. “It’s really common to eat on the street”, she would say. And there was nothing worse than being “common”. 

So that’s that for plastic for the time being. The sun is actually shining. Maybe we’ll go litter-picking.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.