Why 20p won’t solve our plastic problem

My dad was one of those slightly feral 1950s kids who used Liverpool’s Second World War bomb sites as his personal fiefdom.

He still talks about the thrill of finding a glass bottle he could return to the local newsagent for a few pennies. The cash itself didn’t ever touch the counter of course. I think the shopkeeper had a bottle-to-gobstopper exchange rate taped in the window at eight-year-old head height.

For miles around, the ground was picked clean of anything that could be recycled for cash thanks to his knobbly kneed gang. It must have been a scenario played out in every town and city in the country.

Being greener isn’t about finding hi-tech, brand new ways to carry on as before. Far more often, it’s about reverting back to fundamentally good ideas – including when items with intrinsic reusable value were recognised as such.

I’m completely baffled about why we’re still so far behind the rest of Europe when it comes to deposit return schemes (DRS). Sure, glass milk bottles are appearing on doorsteps up and down the country to be used, rinsed and repeated. Or at least, they are as long as you live in a decent-sized town.

But it’s been years since we passed long queues of people posting bags of bottles into reverse vending machines in return for a small cascade of coins when we went to do the holiday food shop.

Despite a collection rate of around 80 per cent compared with our overall national recycling rate of just 46 per cent, there’s still no sign of them on our own high streets... yet.

The Scottish government is in the middle of setting up its deposit return scheme for single-use drinks containers, administered by non-profit Circularity Scotland.

Designed to “improve recycling rates, increase the quality of recycling materials and significantly reduce litter”, the deposit will be 20p and the plans have the backing of more than 70 per cent of the public.

But this week, the original launch date of July next year was pushed back yet again – until summer 2023 – after some heavy-duty lobbying by people like Jim Fox, who offered his views to members of the Scottish parliament in his capacity as associate director of the Scottish Food and Drink Federation, but who also happens to be head of public affairs at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners.

Environmental campaigners are understandably furious, and warn that the delay will add millions more pieces of harmful litter to the environment when we should be doing everything we can to prevent this. Not least because the latest research shows, as we had surely already guessed, that microplastics damage human cells.

An annual count of plastic waste found on Britain’s beaches by marine conservation charity Surfers against Sewage this year found that 16 per cent of all branded packaging pollution found in the UK could be traced back to Coca-Cola.

Two-thirds (65 per cent) of all the items found were traced to one of 12 brands – Coke, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch InBev, McDonald’s, Mondelez International, Heineken, Tesco, Carlsberg Group, Suntory, Haribo, Mars and Aldi.

When I asked for a response to accusations of lobbying, a press spokesperson said Coca-Cola, a founding member of Circularity Scotland, had “long advocated for the introduction of deposit return schemes in Great Britain, which we believe will transform the way in which bottles and cans are collected and recycled. We continue to advocate for this scheme today.

“Our comments reflected what ministers have already heard from many businesses, which is that the Covid-19 pandemic has negatively impacted parts of the food and drink industry and many companies are simply not ready for DRS to be introduced in Scotland next year as originally planned,” she added.

Curiously, in 2018, Fox came up with a somewhat different argument – that such a scheme could be exploited by criminal gangs. I’ll let my dad know.

But all this chat about the start date for an incentivised recycling scheme is distracting us from the real issue – that we must dramatically reduce our dependence on plastic in the first place, because study after study shows that recycling is simply not a get-out-of-jail-free clause – for reasons ranging from the deterioration of repeatedly recycled plastic to the limitations of human psychology.

All year we’ve faced two monumental issues that, for me, come together in this week’s deposit scheme story.

First, the world’s biggest, most polluting brands – from oil companies to the food and drinks manufacturers whose packaging litters this land and every other – appear to be putting equal effort into their greenwashing and their fervent lobbying.

Second, we are greenwashing our own lives if we believe we can even start to halt the rate of environmental decline, including that of our own health, with anything less than fundamental, collective changes to the way we live. Starting with our absolute dependence on single-use plastic.

No deposit scheme in history can match cutting a pollutant out at source for impact, even one with an ambitious 90 per cent collection target.

And as activist Naomi Klein says: “There are no non-radical options left before us.” Sorry, Dad.