Why do we love waste? We use billions of plastic bags we don’t need and bin food we never eat
By JOHN HUMPHRYS
By the time I arrived at my house in Greece, it was late in the evening after a long journey on one of the hottest days of the year.
In Greece, hot means very hot. It was pitch black - no more than a sliver of moon - but I stripped off anyway before I’d even unpacked my bags, rushed down to the sea and fell gratefully into the water. Or rather, I fell into the plastic.
As I discovered the following morning, the entire length of the beach and the water that laps the shingle was garlanded with a million strips of the stuff - almost all of it bits of shredded carrier bags. They had been carried to the shore by a freak change in the tide, way out in the Aegean.
That was two years ago. I thought about it again this week when it was announced that all 33 councils in London had voted for a new law to ban shops in the capital from handing out free plastic carrier bags. Dozens of other towns and cities are planning to do something similar.
Many are following the heroic example of Modbury in Devon where, last year, every shop-owner agreed to ban them. This great movement is catching on around the world, from California to Germany to Ireland. And about time too.
We may, at last, be seeing the beginning of the end of the free plastic carrier bag. Not that they’re really “free”, of course. Nothing is. Anything that costs the retailer money ultimately ends up on our bills. But the biggest cost is to the environment.
The fouling of my pristine beach in Greece is a minuscule example of the incalculable damage these handy little throwaways are doing to the world.
The reason is simple: there are too many of them. No one knows how many are given away on a global basis, but it’s been calculated at about a trillion a minute. In these small islands alone it is a staggering 13 billion every year. And they all have to go somewhere.
Many end up, one way or another, in landfill sites. That might be fine if we had an infinite number of holes in the ground or if the bags decayed after a few years. But we haven’t and they don’t.
Most are virtually indestructible. We use them on average for about 20 minutes and they survive as rubbish for centuries. So they end up everywhere - and I mean everywhere.
I have seen them hanging from trees in an African rainforest, frozen into the fresh ice of an Alaskan glacier and even littering the beach of one of the remotest corners of the world, the Tasmanian wilderness.
And those are just the ones we can see. There are billions in the world’s oceans, from the Arctic to the South Atlantic, eventually torn to shreds and often swallowed by mammals and birds. Marine conservationists estimate that they kill 100,000 whales, seals, dolphins and turtles every year.
A whale washed up on a beach in France had dozens of plastic bags tangled in its intestines, including two from British supermarkets. They are, in short, a menace - and not only for the obvious damage.
Because of its sheer ubiquity, the throwaway plastic carrier bag may be the most potent symbol there has ever been of a society that has lost sight of something with which earlier generations were rightly obsessed. Waste. We use the word lightly. We scatter our conversation with it. But it has lost its moral force. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
Several years ago I was interviewed by one of our more upmarket Sunday newspapers about a book I had written. Rather frighteningly, they sent their most celebrated interviewer to do the job - a fierce woman with a reputation for skewering her subjects in print. I was duly skewered.
She “tricked” me into admitting that when I make a cup of tea for myself I do not fill the kettle to the top but boil only a mug-full of water.
From a two-hour conversation - which covered just about everything from childhood literacy to the state of the nation in general - she picked out that little gem to show that I am an eccentric character.
I was baffled then and I am baffled now. Why would anyone boil more water than they need? It takes longer for the kettle to boil (a waste of time) and uses more water (an increasingly scarce resource) and more electricity (bad for the environment).
But, of course, that misses the point. I was an object of ridicule in the eyes of this clever, sophisticated woman because it was simply very silly even to give a thought to such a quaint old-fashioned notion as waste.
That interview was nearly ten years ago and it would be nice to think that things have changed since then. I’m not sure they have. Most of us these days are conscious of how much energy we use, but that’s mostly because of climate change and bigger bills.
We are still a very long way away from viewing waste in the way our parents and grandparents viewed it - not that they always had much choice in the matter.
Almost nothing was wasted when I was a child quite simply because there was scarcely enough to go around. The historian David Kynaston has written a powerful book, Austerity Britain, in which he describes a nation after five years of war whose people were exhausted, under-nourished and poorly dressed - mostly due to rationing.
Even bread, which was freely available during the war years, was rationed. So was just about everything else. The bacon ration was one ounce a week.
My house had an outdoor lavatory and we used the South Wales Echo rather than enjoy the luxury of toilet rolls. But at least we had hot running water. More than a third of all houses did not - let alone a bathroom or indoor lavatory.
In those circumstances, the very idea of wasting food was anathema. So it remained, long after rationing had come to an end. The Sunday joint was made to last for two, or even three, days and every scrap of leftover food was eaten. Potatoes and cabbage became bubble and squeak, and stale bread became bread pudding.
On my first trip to the United States in the late Sixties I went to a restaurant called, for obvious reasons, The Big Texan. The minimum height for a waiter was 6ft 6in and the signature dish was a 72oz steak. Think of that on your plate. That’s the equivalent of a large leg of lamb.
The big gimmick was that if you ate the whole thing (with jacket potato, starter and pudding) you got the meal free. Many succeeded - there was a list of names on the wall, including that of a New York stevedore who had eaten two - but many more failed.
And, of course, the residue was thrown out. It epitomised the greed and waste of America that made me feel so smug about being British.
Thirty years later we have overtaken them. A government study a few weeks ago showed that the British waste more food than any other people on Earth: almost seven million tons a year. What is truly shocking about this is that half of it - fruit, vegetables, meat, bread and dairy produce - could have been eaten.
It’s not thrown away because it has gone rotten but because we buy more than we need and simply sling it in the bin when we realise we’re not going to eat it. For a typical family of four that means about £35 worth of food is dumped every week.
Lord Haskins, a former government adviser, calls it an “outrage” and he is right.
So who’s to blame? It’s partly the supermarkets. Haskins, who ran Northern Foods, which supplies the big supermarket chains, criticises them for their “beauty pageant” standards: refusing to sell any fruit and veg, for instance, that doesn’t meet their exact requirements for shape and size. God alone knows what risk we might be running by eating an ugly potato or knobbly carrot, but there we are.
They also trim a lot of meat and throw it away, says Haskins, ‘to make the packs appear pretty on the shelf’. And then there are the tricks to entice us to buy so much. The classic is the BOGOF: Buy One, Get One Free.
But it’s no good blaming the supermarkets. They will argue that they are merely doing what all retailers try to do: giving the customers what they want.
There’s a lot of truth in that. No one is forcing us to fall for it. We like supermarkets and what they have to offer. One study after another has shown that it can be much cheaper to buy food in local shops and markets than at Tesco or Asda, but we want the choice and the convenience, and that’s that. The problem lies with the kind of food we buy and what we do with it when we get it home.
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