Plastic Bottles and Coffee Cups

Pauline Latham Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the Committee, of which he is a fantastic, excellent and constructive member. He provides challenge as well as co-operation, which is how we get to a good place and find cross-party agreement.

I remember visiting Juba in South Sudan in 2012 and noticing that there was very little water there for people, and that all the aid workers and visitors were using plastic bottles. There was no waste infrastructure whatever. This is a really important problem, because we know that huge amounts of waste are thrown into rivers in Africa, India and the far east. We need to get that waste out of the rivers. How do we do that? We pay people to do it. It is not just kids in the UK who will collect 5p or 10p plastic bottles; people will do the right thing, but they need a cash incentive to do it. The United Nations has an opportunity to achieve that through the international climate fund. We all tend to think about that in relation to green energy and clean energy, but we need to look at how some of these climate funds are allocated and spent at supranational level, and at how our own UK aid budget could be used to help to set up systems to keep plastic out of the oceans. As I said earlier, there is only one ocean and we need to do more to protect it.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I recently went to Bangladesh, and along the whole beach the plastic litter was waist-high. The amount was huge. I have spoken to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development about this. Does the hon. Lady agree that it would be a good idea to spend some of our aid money on paying people to clear up the mess? It is, after all, going into the same ocean that we use and that everyone else uses. That would help people to clean up their environment, which would also help their tourism, because people will go to a clean beach but not a filthy beach.

[Mary Creagh]

I agree with the hon. Lady. She makes an excellent point. Bangladesh is absolutely at the forefront of climate change, and much of our aid budget is going there to make homes more resilient, but resilience in communities is also about giving people a good, clean, safe environment to live in and ensuring that the poor have decent incomes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I must apologise to the House and to the Minister for not being able to say for the end of the debate; I have a pressing engagement in my constituency. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) on securing this debate. It is such a shame it is on a Thursday afternoon, when, like me, many people need to be in their constituency, because it is an important debate and the whole House should be getting behind it.

I was one of the MPs who tried to give up single-use plastics for Lent—like many, I completely failed. I did my level best. My husband even did his level nest. He does the shopping now. He took containers to the supermarket to get things without a plastic bag. He took brown paper bags. However, this was not easy. The one lasting difference it has made is that we have bought a yoghurt making machine and we do not buy yoghurt any more—we make it ourselves. However, it is extremely difficult to manage without single-use plastics. The hon. Lady talked about cups in the street, but I wonder whether she noticed the plastic bottles after the London marathon, which were dozens deep along the streets. That is wrong. We need to keep runners hydrated, but using single-use plastics to do so is such a waste of resources.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I was one of the MPs who took part in the London marathon. In a slight defence of the marathon organisers, I should say that they did trial paper cups along the route for the first time to try to reduce the plastics. The hon. Lady is right to put what she said on the record, but the organisers are probably mindful of that and that is why we had quite an innovative time this year.

[Mrs Latham]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, but there were millions of these bottles on the streets and that is a total waste of resources; after one quick glug, they were thrown away. When I came to London from Derby on the train this week, I saw notices at the station saying, “Keep hydrated. Carry a bottle of water with you.” However, the station had nowhere where people could fill a bottle up with water, although we are given bottles of water on the train. That is unacceptable because those bottles are not recycled.

[Chris Green (Bolton West) (Con)]

I, too, took part in the London marathon and I can tell my hon. Friend that having a bottle was far better than having a cup because when you are jogging along you are going to bounce a lot of liquid out of the cup. Would it not be a really important innovation if both the top and the body of the bottle were made of the same plastic, as that would make recycling easier?

[Mrs Latham]

That would make recycling much easier. In the future, if we have the machines that will take these bottles, lots of entrepreneurial young people will be going to get these bottles and getting the money back. That scheme is a good idea, but we need to change the way people behave; we need to stop them using these things. The London marathon is a difficult case, because people need to keep hydrated when they are running.

As we heard from the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), children are really interested in this problem and they really care. They need to educate their parents, who tend to throw the rubbish out of the car window. We also need to continue this education when students get to university, because once they get there, they forget many of the lessons they learned when they were younger. We need to continue that education and make sure universities are places where both recycling and encouraging people not to use these plastics in the first place are very high priorities. I am not going to steal the thunder of my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), who is the Chairman of the Administration Committee, on which I serve, but I wish to mention the steps the Committee has taken and the recommendations of the House authorities, who have done an amazing job. We asked them to look at the problem within the House and they have gone a step further, and we are going to have radical change in this place. The House of Lords has agreed to this, too, so it will take place through both Houses. I am delighted about that, but I am sure we will hear the facts and figures later when my hon. Friend will be discussing this.

I also wish to commend the Foreign Office because it has made a big impact. It has introduced the latte levy and improved it, increasing it from 10p to 50p. The Foreign Office has got rid of plastic cups, crockery, cutlery, straws and single-use condiment sachets from all its London staff canteens. It is also providing reusable or biodegradable alternatives.

I am sorry I will not be here to hear the Minister’s answer on this because I am concerned about biodegradable products. I believe they just go into smaller pieces, animals still eat them and this is still going to cause a problem. If we can come up with innovative solutions, we can reduce the overall amount of plastic waste.

I read about a scheme where a community in the south-west took all its non-recyclable waste back to the supermarket at the end of one month. That was a huge amount of waste. The aim was to show the supermarket what a huge problem it is. We heard earlier about products such as Pringles, where the packaging is made of five different materials. I do not know whether some of these plastics are recyclable or not, because the logos are very confusing—given that I am interested in this subject, this is probably a problem for most people.

Instead of just us in this House changing our behaviour, every Department should be instructed to stop using single-use plastics. We cannot criticise other people unless the whole of government, in every Department, be it in London or in places such as the Department for International Development’s office in Glasgow, stops using this plastic. We will then be able to say to people, “We have put our house in order. Will you put yours in order?”

Time is short, so I shall finish by saying that instead of just not using the plastics, we ought to be investing money in trialling ways of reusing the plastics that are used. I understand that in Mexico houses are being built from plastic bottles. These houses are cheap and sustainable, and they will last for 500 years. We should invest in such alternative uses for plastics, if we have to have some of them, instead of just saying that we will burn them or put them into landfill if they cannot be recycled.

It is really important that the Government lead the world, and they need to lead from the front. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is incredibly keen on recycling and all things green, and I commend him for his energy and enthusiasm, but I am unhappy about the environment plan running for 25 years. I would like to see things happen much faster, and I would like the Government to look into investing in alternative technologies.

[Several hon. Members rose—]