Life of a Plastic Bottle

You're out and about and feeling thirsty. You go into a shop and buy a bottle of your favourite fizzy drink and you gratefully gulp it down. A moment or two of bliss on a hot day.

But what now? Carry the empty with you until you get home, or put it in a litter bin?

This is a regular dilemma for me. In truth, I should be taking a reused bottle of water with me when I'm out. It's cheaper and doesn't add to the mass of plastic out there already. But I'm never that organised and I prefer my drinks chilled.

The answer to my earlier question is: Take it home (Unless recycling bins are available). Bottles that go into a public bin are unlikely to be separated, so will most likely go to a dump or be incinerated.

By taking it home and putting it in your own recycling bin, it then has a chance to be recycled as a bottle again. This stops it ending up in landfill, and reduces the carbon footprint of the new bottle:

• 80% of all plastic ever made has ended up in the environment or in landfill. 
• Today, 8 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans, each year.
• Manufacturing a tonne of recycled plastic bottles creates 1 to 3 tonnes less CO2 than a tonne made the usual way (from oil).

Clearly, recycled bottles are better for the environment. However, globally, only 7% become bottles again. Even in the UK, the recycling rate is only 14%.

Why is that?

Basically, it's cost. It is cheaper to produce a plastic bottle from scratch, from oil, than by using recycled material. That's because oil is relatively cheap at the moment.

If we are to reduce both the carbon footprint of plastic and reduce the amount of plastic going into the environment, then the economics have to change. 

Raising the price of oil is clearly out, therefore governments need to make the use of recycled plastic more attractive to manufacturers. Or recycling plastic needs become less costly.

What we're doing with plastics is clearly unsustainable. We need to change our attitudes towards it.

We need to reduce the amount of plastic packaging being used; reduce the frivolous, unnecessary purchases we make; reuse wherever possible; and create a market where recycled materials are favoured against raw materials like oil.

This can only come about when governments, companies, and the public recognise the dangers of our throwaway society, and work together to overcome them.

It's a big ask but, somehow, I think we've got to learn to work together if we're going to meet the challenges that face us all this century.

(Source of figures: New Scientist, 19 May 2018)

Paying for Carbon Cuts: Green Taxes

If and when the international community gets it's act together and starts delivering on the Paris Climate deal of 2015, how do we pay for it?

There are numerous ways of doing this, but they generally have a common theme: Make sure the price of goods and services include the cost of their carbon footprint.

Just about everything we buy has carbon emissions associated with it - Energy was used in processing the raw materials, manufacturing the final product, and transporting it. A large proportion of that energy would have been generated from fossil fuels, and these are contributing to climate change.

You might think that this means that the price of everything will go up to reflect that cost. However, that shouldn't be the case. If the world is to reduce it's emissions, then the industries and companies that emit the most should be taxed the most and these taxes used to subsidise those industries and companies which are being the most efficient.

The general idea being that efficiency is rewarded (subsidies) and inefficiency is penalised (green taxes).

However, green taxes need to be used with care, otherwise you end up hitting the wrong people.

For example, you could put a tax on petrol/diesel to change people's driving behaviour and encourage the take-up of hybrid & electric cars. This sounds reasonable until you realise that this would hit the poor hardest, as they have less (if any) 'disposable' income.

President Macron of France learnt this to his cost towards the end of 2018. He applied a green tax to fuel and sparked off mass protests across France. And it's not as if this wasn't predictable either. Britain had a similar experience a decade or so ago when the UK government tried the same thing.

Using taxes in this way shows how out of touch politicians are with the poorest in society and brings green taxes into disrepute.

The poor around the world are likely to be hardest hit by climate change in the future. If we are to prevent the worst effects of carbon emissions then we cannot afford to turn the poor against our efforts before we've even begun.

They have to be protected or the battle's as good as lost.

(More here)

COP24: Katowice Climate Conference

I first started this blog in 2010 because I was very disappointed in the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP15).

At the time, many millions of people around the world expected politicians to finally sign an agreement to deal with climate change but, instead, we got a meaningless 'accord'.

At a stroke, much of the public who were clamouring for a deal, just gave up on climate change as a lost cause. So it wasn't until 2015 that a final deal was struck at the Paris conference (COP21) in 2015.

It was an historic moment, but it should have happened many years earlier. The science, after all, has been pretty clear on the issue for decades.

So what?

Well, anyone who has been following what the climate change experts have been saying for years is that: The later we start to deal with climate change, the harder the effects of dealing with it will be on society and the more expensive measures they bring in will be.

So the politicians (and climate deniers, who've deliberately muddied the waters), have let us all down - Had we started dealing with climate change when it first became a clear threat, we'd have barely noticed the measures our governments would have needed to implement.

After decades of dithering, we're definitely going to notice them now.

But even that will be nothing compared to what we'd face if we do nothing and let the climate warm by more than 2 degrees C.

Anyway, back to COP24 (Katowice December 2018). In 2015, the nations of the world agreed to keep warming to less than 2 degrees. Since then they've submitted their plans to help do that and been trying to agree rules on how to make sure these plans happen.

However, those plans, combined, would only keep warming down to around 3C. Not enough.

So the hopes from Katowice were that a) The above rules would be agreed; and b) Nations would up their ambition.

It looks like it succeeded with a) but utterly failed with b). See here for a summary.

Not only that but the climate change plans, weak as they are, don't come into effect until 2020.

Yet more delay. Yet more pain to be suffered by us when they finally get going.