Plastics and pollution: Cut careless usage to avert threat

ANY link between the Grenfell inferno — at least 58 dead — and a black plastic bag made by a company that has not existed since 1956 being unearthed, in pristine condition, on a beach may seem tenuous. 

Plastics and pollution: Cut careless usage to avert threat

However, both events speak to a theme that epitomises the great, anti-democratic shift in power in societies everywhere — what happens when regulations designed to protect people or the environment are deliberately inadequate or just ignored? What happens when commercial interests prevail over all other interests?

That question was answered in London last week. That tragedy, an avoidable consequence of a cold indifference to the safety of Grenfell residents, was exacerbated yesterday when Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, said the cladding used at Grenfell, the material blamed for spreading the blaze, is banned in Britain. If it is banned, how was it used so recently and so extensively? That type of cladding is manufactured — and used — in Ireland.

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