The ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, despite 11 years working for Elf, the French petro-chemicals giant, increasingly turned against the use of fossil resources. He described Prince (now king) Charles as a 'prophet- for voicing anti-plastic concerns. However, the late and much-admired Queen Elizabeth offered a fine example. Her staff reported that she kept her morning cornflakes fresh in a Tupperware bowl. Not for her Spode or silverware for the overnight exposure to palace chill. Milk could be poured on and the brilliant plastic dish became a liquid proof serving vessel. In this Her Majesty replicated the actions of millions across the globe!
Plastic is the result of research that began with Bakelite in 1907. The Holy Grail was always to find a product cheap, insinuative, waterproof and …. well 'plastic' enough from which to form a vast array of products. The siren anti-plastic' lobbyists forget or ignore just how inferior the alternatives are and how much more 'damaging' their production is. This is the lazy shallowness of 'virtue signallers' who dominate the subject.
After several months in South East Asia I am struck by the benefits of plastic containers for the food of the poor. Made using heat, plastic products are inherently sterile. Food in plastic keeps fresh for longer, less is needed to feed a family. Invariably this spares people from heating the inside of their homes in an already hot climate. Plastic liberates women from a domestic chore leading to far greater equality. Buying street-food myself I rejoiced that the vendor slipped-on a flimsy glove of polythene before dextrously slicing ingredients. I ate from a plastic plate and no hot water was necessary for washing-up – no consumption of electricity or gas nor water wastage.
The plastic switches and sockets in my house are so inexpensive and safe compared with those in my grandparents' home, made as they were with porcelain insulation set into a metal casing. Porcelain was mined, transported, moulded and kiln-fired, and metal mined and refined using vast fuel resources.
My mother bought blocks of 'mousetrap cheddar imported from New Zealand in waxed cheesecloth in the 1960's Nowadays polythene wraps keep a convenient 300 gram block fresh for weeks, lowering the cost, abolishing mould and waste and making it one of the very low-cost commodities for a family shop. Ham and cooked-meats and fish likewise was plentiful and cheap. What ever can be sinful about this?
Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the development of the 4 pint milk bottle. My brother Colin Wood, in the early 1970's was a production engineer on the first large-scale milk bottle line at Plysu Plastics. Tests had shown that the old glass milk bottle delivered by jaunty milkmen from a milk-float was in fact already 'going-off'. Glass milk bottles could never be as sterile as a plastic blow moulding. Lashings of hot water and detergent are necessary to remove the greasy deposits and casein traces left from the bottle's previous trip. Bottles were heavy and expensive to collect and recycle. Plastic milk bottles were very cheap and sterile and the main task of the production engineer was to assemble hundreds inside a shrink-wrap plastic covering for despatch to the dairy. The consequence was that fresh milk stayed fresh, became cheaper, was not sour and wasted and became a central part of a healthy British diet. Other drinks come in plastic and those that do not – beer and wine notably – involve the waste of glassmaking silica material, heated to about 1700 degrees and then thrown-away into a recycling skip. How pray is this morally superior to a plastic bottle?
So many objects previously made of refined metal – from ores sourced overseas and refined using vast fuel resources, can be made of plastic. My toys of the '50's were sheet 'tin' with sharp edges. Washing bowls were sheet steel covered in a fire-glazed enamel. Likewise buckets, or else they were galvanised using imported zinc. Clothes had steel zips or button made of bone or ivory. Many tools have plastic handles that replace wood in days gone by – no felling of trees, kiln-drying and machining needed. The 'virtuous' swagger from their boutiques bearing paper bags apparently unaware that the paper industry involves the felling of trees and then more particularly messy and energy-consuming processing that utterly eclipses the carbon-footprint of a plastic carrier.
Before giving any further truck to the environment finger-waggers and the obsessive anti-plastic lobby, check that actually plastic is the least damaging option, and very often by a huge margin. So, on balance, surely God likes plastic and its contribution to the well-being of mankind.
The issue is certainly how to collect and process abandoned plastic yet almost nothing at all is said about how this should and could be done on a grand scale. In the Developing World environmentalists would make more headway and be much more in tune with the needs of poor people if they funded incentivising schemes for plastic collection. My observation is that almost nowhere have I seen plastic collection points in south-east Asia. In Europe some plastic waste is converted into substitute 'timbr' for decking boards, cladding boards and posts. Sheet roofing would be a great alternative to Chinese-produced corrugated steel that arrives by the pallet-load. These would directly offset tree felling and are durable in wet land. Low temperature heating can melt plastic into blocks. More is used to be spun into yarn and cloth and it would be wonderful if the most influential voices from the environment lobby actually associated themselves with practical action – both praising plastic and offering a lead on re-cycling and re-purposing this wonderful product.
