Untitled Lesson

Multiple Choice

So are we just wrong about plastic packaging?

Is it time to stop worrying and learn to love the disposable plastic wrapping around sandwiches? Certainly there are bigger targets for environmental savings such as improving household insulation and energy emissions. Naturally, tire plastics industry is keen to point them out. What’s more, concern over plastic packaging has produced a squall of conflicting initiatives from retailers, manufacturers and local authorities. It’s a squall that dies down and then blows harder from one month to the next. ‘It is being left to the individual conscience and supermarkets playing the market,’ says Tim Lang, a professor specializing in food polio’. ‘It’s a mess.’

• 1. The role of research

• 1. A lack of consistent policy

• 1. An irrational anxiety

Multiple Choice

Close up, plastic packaging can be a marvellous thing. Those who make a living from it call it a forgotten infrastructure that allows modem urban life to exist. Plastics have helped society defy natural

limits such as the seasons, the rotting of food and the distance most of us live from where our food is produced. And yet we do not like it. Partly we do not like waste, but plastic waste, with its hydrocarbon roots and industrial manufacture, is especially galling. In 2008 , the UK, for example, produced around two million tonnes of plastic waste, twice as much as in tire early 1990s . The very qualities of plastic – its cheapness, its indestructible aura – make it a reproachful symbol of an unsustainable way of life. The facts, however, do not justify our unease. All plastics are, at least theoretically, recyclable. Plastic packaging makes up just 6 to 7 per cent of the contents of British dustbins by weight and less than 3 per cent of landfill. Supermarkets and brands, which are under pressure to reduce the quantity of packaging of all types that they use, are finding good environmental reasons to turn to plastic: it is lighter, so requires less energy for transportation than glass, for example; it requires relatively little energy to produce; and it is often reusable. An Austrian study found that if plastic packaging were removed from tire supply chain, other packaging would have to increase fourfold to make up for it.

• 1. The role of research

• 1. A lack of consistent policy

• 1. An irrational anxiety

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