Don’t bottle it, Michael Gove
2017, to put it mildly, has not been a good year for Britain. We are beleaguered with political uncertainty, socially divided, riddled with sex pests, and run by a woman who would rather be doing literally anything else.
But when it comes to enjoying Blue Planet 2, none of that seems to stop us. Yesterday evening, a staggering 14.1 million people – almost a quarter of the entire population – tuned in to watch the haunting spectre of a myriad of beautiful jellyfish dangling in the briny main, and it’s predicted that next week’s episode, “Green Seas”, will be even more popular.
Why? Because the British are a nation of sea lovers. We are proud of our rich maritime heritage, and we relish our island status. Young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural, leaver or remainer, David Attenborough celebrating the beauty and power of the oceans seems to move us all.
We are also, thanks to our thousands of miles of coastline, eye witnesses to plastic ocean pollution. And it’s not a pretty sight. An estimated 300 million tonnes of plastic litters the ocean, and eight million tonnes is added each year. Travelling on currents, it appears in every corner of our planet – from Cornish beaches, to uninhabited Pacific islands – even trapped in Arctic ice.
The impact on ocean life is frightening. Big pieces of plastic are choking and entangling turtles and seabirds, while tiny pieces are clogging the stomachs of creatures who mistake it for food.
New research published this week shows that, because items such as plastic bottles degrade, fragment, and then sink into the sea bed, plastic is now being found in the stomachs of animals living six miles below the ocean surface – and it is thought that by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the seas.
For the English sailor navigating his way through a plastic soup, or the Scottish mother on a beach wresting colourful detritus out of the grip of her toddler, the problem is tangibly close. And it is perhaps because of this proximity that we are united when it comes to tackling it.
While other environmental policies are magnets for controversy – farmers and soil conservationists are at loggerheads, as are free marketeers and clean energy activists – any project which aims to “clean up the seas” inspires near universal support. Incredibly, the charge on plastic bags is now backed by 80% of the population, and Green Peace and the Daily Mail are running concurrent campaigns aimed at reducing plastic consumption.
For our exhausted and fractured Government, this unanimity offers an opportunity to bow out with one positive legacy: save the sea, and the country may just forgive you the rest.
Environment Secretary, Michael Gove, grasps this. He is an intellectual who understands and respects the case for Conservative Environmentalism, and a politician who is capable of gauging public mood. In a speech last month, he explained that “if we are to be the first generation to leave our environment in a better state than we found it, we must protect our oceans and marine life from plastic waste… and that means tackling the rise in plastic bottles entering our waters by making it simpler and easier to recycle and dispose of them appropriately.” He has now issued a call for evidence, inviting organisations and individuals to share their views with the government on different types of reward and return schemes for plastic, metal and glass drinks containers that could help reduce the number of bottles entering our waterways. The call closes today, and it is thought that a decision will be made some time in the new year.
It’s a step in the right direction, but for someone who specialises in big, bold, common sense reforms, it is a disappointingly small one.
The answer to the plastic water bottle problem is not a deposit scheme – which tend to be complicated to introduce, expensive to run, and anachronistic in an age where large, impersonal supermarkets far outnumber local shops with regular customers – but a total ban on single use plastic water bottles.
These bottles, one million of which are bought around the world every minute, only exist because of an incredibly successful marketing campaign in the 1970s – and have survived purely because no one has had the guts to take on the industry.
Over the last century, the developed world has created remarkable municipal water systems that provide high quality, low cost water to every household that has a pipe. The only way in which 1970s bottled water companies could compete against these systems was by advertising: by convincing people, using beautiful actors and actresses, that one particular brand of bottled water is going to make them more popular, or sexier, or healthier.
The ploy worked a treat, and suddenly, people who had spent their whole life drinking clean, fresh water for almost nothing out of their taps, began flocking to supermarkets to buy almost exactly the same stuff, for 500 times the price, packaged up in a fancy plastic bottle.
Unlike most advertising-inspired fads, bottled water stuck around. Britain now consumes a stunning 3bn litres of bottled water per year, and the industry is worth around £2bn per year. Ironically, because of added salt and minerals, bottled water may actually be less healthy than the H20 found in our taps.
But at last, the tide is turning. In San Francisco, a pioneering city when it comes to the environment, the sale and distribution of single-use bottled water has been banned on city property since 2014 – and in London’s Borough Market, free drinking water fountains are being introduced this winter as part of a new pledge to phase out sales of all single-use plastic bottles over the next six months. Wherever “cool” San Francisco and Borough Market lead, others will surely follow; a push from the Government is all they need.
Historically, Conservatives have been rightly squeamish when it comes to interfering with free-market driven industries. But sometimes, the free market goes wrong, and in those cases, it is the duty of a responsibly Conservative Government to set it back on track. The free market’s greatest asset is its ability to adapt to change, and if Michael Gove did the sensible thing and used his reforming prowess to put a kibosh on the £2bn single-use plastic bottle industry, I have no doubt that new industries would eagerly fill the gap. I wouldn’t put it past the marketing departments, for example, to start telling us that only one brand of refillable bottle is “cool” – and I wouldn’t put it past us to fall for it.
While the country settles down next Sunday night for its weekly dose of sea worship, Michael Gove should be working on his action plan.