Sir, – We must find ways of reducing single-use plastic food packaging. Which one of our big supermarket chains is going to take the lead in solving this crisis? The retailer that does so will undoubtedly draw business from its rivals.
Plastics in the ocean don’t break down, they break up and proliferate. These micro-plastics fuse with chemical dioxins that are eaten by fish and shellfish while feeding on plankton. A recent study by NUIG has found that 73 per cent of deep-sea fish in the northwest Atlantic have ingested microplastics. We eat the fish and the phthalates enter our food chain causing liver and kidney damage. They’re both carcinogenic and endocrine disruptors, altering our hormones.
The vast majority of our plastic food packaging isn’t currently recyclable and goes straight into landfill. If you bring it to a recycling centre, you’re charged by the bag to put it in general waste. Household waste and business waste are illegally dumped both in a piecemeal and systematic way, entering lakes, rivers and directly into the sea.
There’s a momentum and consensus building to tackle plastic pollution. Shoppers are cutting away the plastic encasing their groceries and leaving the packaging at the shops.
Now that China has closed its doors – and it has accepted 95 per cent of Irish-exported plastic up to now – it’s time to both recycle it ourselves and scale back on plastic usage.
When I fill a bag with waste when leaving a beach like White Strand near Killadoon in Mayo, it’s frequently dumped household plastic waste like the packaging of soda bread and black plastic vegetable punnets, masses of plastic water bottles and detergent squirters. You’d think that a shopper so conscientious as to what he’s putting into his own body that he buys bottled water, eats fresh vegetables and soda bread slathered with sunflower oil might think twice about then leaving his plastic grocery waste to be washed out to sea?
Can a cost-effective move not be made to offer mass-produced bread products like this in airtight resealable cardboard or paper? Or sell airtight tin bread-bins along with the loaves packaged in paper? Can biodegradable and compostable alternatives be used to supplant all this single-use plastic packaging?
Whatever about microwaveable ready-meals, bananas, apples and oranges don’t need to come in a plastic or plastic-mesh bag – they’ve evolved perfectly effective packaging themselves. Can they offer all your fruit and vegetable products loose? And provide paper or cardboard carriers for these items?
Can the use of microbeads in your cosmetics and household products be eliminated entirely, in line with the policy Lidl has undertaken?
Marks & Spencer claims to be researching the possible use of one polymer across its entire range of plastic packaging, making it easier to recycle. Will the other supermarket groups also accelerate investment in these paths of reducing its plastic output?
If the frozen food chain Iceland keeps to its pledge of eliminating all plastic packaging for its own-brand products within five years, will others match or better that goal?
Ireland is one of the EU’s top per capita producers of plastic – each of us throws out on average 61kg of plastic every year.
If the seas die, we die. Saving our oceanic food chain is the biggest challenge we face, second only to tackling climate change. And the two are inextricably linked, when you consider the volume of oil used to manufacture the plastics in the first place.
A sea change is coming whether plastic packaging producers want it or not, and there’s an opportunity here for a grocery behemoth to lead it. It’s not just an ethical issue of preventing cruelty to wildlife, it’s an urgently needed response to a timebomb that threatens our own survival.
Which major grocer operating in Ireland is going to step up to the challenge and reform food packaging? Wherever there’s an unmet appetite, there’s money to be made and a lucrative market to win. – Yours, etc,
NICK McGINLEY,
Dundalk,
Co Louth.