Victoria White: How Government packaged its support of industry as sustainability

Am I part of the Government’s greenwashing campaign?

That’s what I’m thinking as I look at the box of litter pickers, gloves, and high-visibility vests, mostly manufactured in China and mostly wrapped in plastic and cardboard, which has just been delivered to my door.

The kit, valued at €800, was funded for the Dodder Action river clean-up group by South Dublin County Council to help its effort to clean the River Dodder in under-privileged areas of Tallaght.

The gear will be put to work immediately.

Just last Saturday, Dodder Action and the Dodder Valley Litter Mugs extracted 25 bags of litter, a bike, an ironing board, a scooter, and electrical appliances from the lovely little Whitestown stream in Tallaght.

Before the gang got working, a year ago, the stream was clogged with litter. It had stopped flowing where a swamp of bottles and cans had collected.

It is the fond hope of many south Dubliners who have never been to Tallaght’s Jobstown and Killinarden that the junk will just stay up there. It doesn’t. Down it comes, when the river surges, and it swathes the banks of Dublin 4.

Which is not to say that the swankiest parts of the river’s course don’t have their own dumping problems. Last Saturday, I was leading my monthly clean-up of the banks at Milltown, Dublin 6, where wholesale dumping is going on behind recycling bins in a Dublin City Council-run facility on the river bank.

Adding the 39 bags of litter collected by the group last Saturday to the annual total, Dodder Action has collected 14 tonnes of rubbish from the river banks this year and contributed 1,000 volunteer hours.

I’m not saying it’s not fun. I’m not saying the three councils that abut the river aren’t right to support us.

What I’m saying is that I’m made sick by the finding of this newspaper’s Juno McEnroe and former Sinn Féin MEP, Lynn Boylan, that our Government worked with the packaging industry to kill off the Green Party’s Waste Reduction Bill (2017) and to weaken the EU’s Single Use Plastics Directive.

My concern that I am part of the Government’s greenwash is prompted by its briefing note to the EU on its plastics directive, which reinforces arguments weakening the directive with the news that “citizen activation and awareness-raising programmes” are “an area of strength for Ireland”.

Oh, look, that’s me there in my waders, extracting bottles and cans from the river with a Chinese picker kindly provided by the exchequer.

My sickness is worsened by the fact that our little river clean-up group was among those that prompted the Green Party to include deposits on bottles and cans in their Waste Reduction Bill (2017), after Donnybrook Scouts collected 650 such items in two hours on an approximately 100m stretch of river bank at one of our clean-ups.

Such deposits had been previously ruled out under the Fianna Fáil/Green coalition, following a report commissioned from Dominic Hogg and heavily referenced thereafter by Repak.

Repak is an industry-led waste management organisation, which includes on its board members from some of the country’s leading producers of packaging waste, such as Kelloggs, the National Plastic Packaging Group, Coca Cola Hellenic, and the Musgrave Group.

It was hardly surprising that the report they reference argues strongly against such a deposit scheme. It ignored the cost of litter to the economy, reckoned in Scotland to be £61m (€72m) annually.

Scotland’s deposit scheme for glass and plastic bottles and aluminium cans — supported by a report by the same Dominic Hogg — will become law next year and go live, by way of a 20p deposit and reverse vending machines in shops, by 2021.

It is supported by 77% of Scots, will result in an estimated 31,000 fewer plastic bottles, and will prevent 4m tonnes of CO2 being emitted over the next quarter-century.

These possibilities were not pointed to by Repak when our Government reverted to them to help steer their response to the Green Party’s Waste Reduction Bill in 2017.

Instead, Repak directed them to Packaging Recycling Group Scotland’s paper, which argued that a deposit system “is not right for Scotland” and suggested that it could “easily apply to Ireland”.

For this citizen to see her own Government actively working against positive environmental measures, with the help of the packaging industry, causes revulsion.

If you have stood in a river, trying to extract polystyrene that turns to tapioca in your hands, and have watched helplessly as those little balls of plastic have travelled towards the waiting mouths of fish and birds — and this is happening in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction, a biodiversity crisis that threatens life on Earth — you feel very angry when you see an official of your own Government contacting Repak to “keep them in the loop” with the news that France was “pushing” to have expanded polystyrene banned and asking if Repak would have “any problems” with this move.

Unsurprisingly, Repak was “inclined to wait” until there was more research on expanded polystyrene, before making “any major decisions in this area”.

The birds and the fish of the Dodder can’t wait any more than can the birds and the fish beloved of river communities from Inishowen, Co Donegal, to Glounthane, Co Cork, with which we volunteers have connected through our work.

Astonishingly, our Government was even prepared to countenance the tobacco lobby, who objected that the European directive’s new rules on plastic would impact the sale and collection of their plastic cigarette butts, which are the second most common form of litter and which are so polluting that, as Business Against Litter recently reported, one butt can pollute 200 litres of ground water.

Irish officials suggested that they were being contacted too late for tobacco’s representation to change the outcome, but, in the end, argued successfully with the tobacco industry against consumption-reduction targets for cigarette butts in the EU Plastics Directive.

Repak argued for industry to do less and for mutts like me to do more, through “targeted education and awareness-raising” and “investment in enforcement, targeting anti-social behaviour.”

While shouting loudly about its sustainability credentials, our Government faithfully represented the interests of the industries represented by Repak against the biodiversity of our rivers and seas: they “highlighted” the burden that small industries might feel if plastic tops were “tethered” to bottles; they complained of a “lack of definition” about targets for such items as beverage cartons and wet wipes; they argued that the consumer should share the cost of dealing with a littered item as much as its producer; they quibbled the success of deposit-and-return schemes.

They pointed at me, the eejit in the river with the Chinese picker, to represent Ireland’s success in tackling the litter that their industry buddies helped chuck in and which streams past me in ever increasing amounts, towards the sea.