Bizcuits | From plastic-free-July to product stewardship

Leanda Lee

I knew it was bad: I had sailed dinghies in that murky delta water, ignored whatever happened to be floating past; I had pulled shredded flotsam from large yacht propellers; I’d implored children to wear swimming booties on the beach; and now and again peered over wharf-side when boarding the TurboJet to dismay at the soup of heaving debris. The bloated pig carcass on the Hac Sa boat ramp that one afternoon, disgusting as it was, was unsurprising and stood as a porcine example of our rapacious and increasingly damaging, unenlightened and convenience-seeking habits.

A Decisive Moment photograph of plastic rubbish strewn on Hac Sa beach in June 2016 and a letter to the editor on the 29th recommending coordinated governmental efforts to deal with the waste in our waterways prompted me to research the problem and embark on the Plastic Free July Challenge. Then came reports of Macau to Hong Kong ferries being delayed by rubbish clogging engines. Finally, injuries – “Everyone was bleeding”, read a SCMP headline – when 124 people were injured one night in October as a high-speed ferry with 174 on board hit semi-submerged junk.

We have come far down the path foretold in The Graduate when in 1967 Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock was given career advice with “One word: plastics” – the industry of the future. How completely we have embraced the lifestyle depicted in the 1950s disposable polyethylene-lined Dixie Cup advertisements saving “all the work” of dishwashing, drying and putting away; the age of convenience was upon us.

Where exactly is the “away” we throw to? Single-use plastic bags are used for 12 minutes on average and take 450 years to “decompose”. Most single-use plastic is sent to landfill, only 9 percent of plastic is (down)cycled, and the rest leaks into the environment, 8 million tonnes of which end in the ocean every year (as of 2015) – waste with staying power and increasing toxicity.

We have created an ecological crisis of such proportion and permanence that it is fast being presented as the one man-made environmental disturbance that has potential to have greater impact than climate change.

People are beginning to respond, not just the savvy consumer, but governments and retailers are being forced to deal with the crisis. This month, India made the unprecedented decision to ELIMINATE ALL single-use plastic by 2022 in ALL Indian states, with Modi saying “It is the duty of each one of us to ensure that the quest for material prosperity does not compromise our environment.” That puts paid to the idea that poverty alleviation and environmental responsibility are mutually exclusive.

As of yesterday, the major supermarkets in my home state have banned single-use plastic bags. Only baby steps, but the slow recognition by large corporates of after-sales responsibilities and the halting and sometimes antagonistic responses to habit change from the average shopper are case studies in themselves. Change is difficult, but it will become easier as cyclical economic systems are established.

In this category sits my new corporate hero, Ikea. Often viewed as a furniture store for young homemakers who could not afford the real deal, Ikea was cheap enough to fit right into the wasteful ‘fast furniture’ market: one interior today, another tomorrow.  This month they announced their commitments for 2030 which include circular principles of production, improving longevity of the products (repairability, handing on), and removal of ALL single-use plastic products. Products will be designed to be repurposed, repaired, reused, resold and (the moral dilemma of them all) recycled. Ikea has leapfrogged the immediate calls from the environmentally conscious consumer movement.

Eventually, such business models will become mandated through Product Stewardship legislation. Manufacturers and sellers will then take responsibility for their environmental impact from the products, packaging, substances contained in them, and their disposal.