Back in Brussels. Not to present Brexit news, but to speak to MEPs at the European Parliament. They want to hear about Sky TV’s campaign against plastic pollution. It feels dangerously liberating, presenting an argument with the conviction of an activist, rather than with the even-handedness of a referee.
The case, however, is pretty robust. Even my wife, a sceptic on climate change, gets fired up about the way we throw away so much single-use plastic. She is the kind of woman who will pick up, rather than walk around, other people’s litter. So for her, plastic marine pollution is just plain bad manners.
It’s also a peculiarly modern phenomenon, symptomatic of a throwaway culture. My grandfather used matches to light his pipe. Failing that he refilled an ancient Zippo. Now the plastic equivalent ends up in the sea, where it will take about 400 years to break down into polymer nano-particles.
The same disposable exchange has been made in so many areas of our lives, almost without us noticing. Where once we would wet a flannel, now we pluck at a wet wipe. For many, the clink of a milkman’s bottle on the step is nothing but a distant memory. A razor you don’t dump after using – how quaint! And on it goes. Plastic water bottles make sense if you’re worried about cholera, but in Britain?
The clincher for me came last summer. My eldest daughter went to the Reading Festival and, to my disbelief, left her tent behind. “Oh Dad, everybody does that now,” she protested. The throwaway culture now has deep roots.
A lot of this plastic gets recycled. But globally, much of it ends up floating down a river into the sea where it is concentrated in huge gyres – ocean currents which spin plastic items in vast vortexes before dumping them on pristine beaches. That’s the visible stuff.
It’s the 50 trillion pieces of micro-plastic that should worry us. Once those plastic knives and forks are broken down, they are taken up into the food chain, where their impact is, as yet, unknown.
A colleague who’s been working on this recently took a film crew to the Cocos Keeling islands. At dinner with the scientists he’d been interviewing, he noticed that none of them was eating the local fish. Was there a problem? Were they vegans? No, they no longer ate fish, wherever it was landed. Their suspicion was that those nano-particles acted as tiny toxic sponges, leeching everything from pesticide to flame-retardant chemicals out of the sea and into marine life.
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A few weeks ago my boss asked if my family would be prepared to act as guinea pigs in a TV experiment. We would spend a fortnight trying to reduce the amount of single-use plastic, at home, school and work. My older daughters got permission from their teachers to make video diaries and the finished report, aired on Sky TV and online, was an interesting watch.
My wife, Joanna, showed a hitherto underdeveloped talent for consumer affairs journalism, scouring the shops for fruit and veg in paper, rather than plastic, bags. She made the point, one often lost in this debate, that she had time – as a stay-at-home mum – to amble around town in search of food sold loose or in cardboard packaging. If she was a working mother, the TV dinner wrapped in layers of plastic, or the courier-delivered parcel entombed in styrofoam, would be far likelier options.
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I thought about this casually wasteful approach to resources when we had a visit from a local saddler. She came wreathed in smiles, having found the description of my gelding as “an Irish leisure horse” too funny for words. She’d heard of an Irish sports horse, but this new one smacked of clever salesmanship on the part of someone keen to part with a sluggish nag.
She found the right saddle for me and looked at my stirrup leathers, which have seen better days. I was all for throwing them in the bin. “No,” she said, “they just need the buckle moving up and re-stitching.”
I’ve noticed this make-do-and-mend attitude before where saddlery and lorinery is concerned. It might be that, contrary to stereotypes, a lot of horse-owners must watch the pennies. But it could be something to do with the nature of the stuff, the leather: material taken from a once living animal’s back. I recognise this proclivity in myself. My children, watching me spend half an hour “bulling” my leather shoes to a shine, find it bizarre. As odd as wanting to take a tent home after a music festival.
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