Clodagh Finn: Whatever happened to the fight against plastic?

In our rush to embrace plastic protection against Covid-19, we seem to have forgotten the long-term impact

Environmental activist Gary Stokes displays some of the discarded face masks he found on a beach in the residential area of Discovery Bay on Lantau island, Hong Kong. Picture: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty

Keeping your head down has its advantages. For one thing, it helps you keep track of what is happening on the ground — literally. Take litter, for example. What better social barometer than the flotsam and jetsam on our footpaths? Examine what a person casts aside and you will also see what they once held near, if not dear.

By that reckoning, caffeine is still hitting the spot if the sad return of discarded disposable cups tells us anything. Single-use cups, crushed and decaying, are back with a vengeance.

Many Covid-19-conscious cafés have temporarily banned reusable ‘keep cups’, but who would have thought we’d see the impact of that decision so visibly, and so quickly, on our pavements?

Our footpaths are also telling another story. Takeaway cups have a new companion — the disposable mask. The blue face mask is, it seems, the  debris du jour. I counted four discarded samples on a short walk yesterday, but don’t take my word for it.

Local authorities around the country have warned that the careless littering of masks — and disposable gloves — has become a major and “challenging” issue. And not just because litter is unsightly. There is a public health issue too, particularly for workers who have to dispose of waste that may be contaminated by the coronavirus.

We might take some small comfort in knowing that it is not just an Irish problem. 

Conservationists in France have warned that there will soon be more masks than jellyfish in the sea if the rate of ocean pollution continues.

Discarded masks, gloves, and hand sanitiser bottles are littering the seabed and many have been washing up on shorelines around the Mediterranean.

“Would you like to swim with Covid-19 this summer?” Laurent Lombard, snorkeller and founder of Opération Mer Propre (Operation Clean Sea), pointedly asked recently as he described “swimming in a tablecloth of microplastics”.

He is based in the south of France but the issue is a global one that is coming to a beach near you this summer.

We’ve already seen a dramatic rise in illegal dumping during lockdown and, now, as the country is starting to open up, there has been a surge in litter, much of it plastic, as people enjoy the bounty of our beaches, mountains, rivers and waterways.

Here is just one telling example. In late June, rangers at Murlough National Nature Reserve filled 60 bin bags with the rubbish they found on Murlough Beach, a blue flag beach on the edge of the Mourne Mountains.

If you were to analyse the rubbish, putting it under a social behaviour microscope, you could tell the story of a population breaking out after months of restrictions.

The wrappers and plastic bags and cans tell the story of a people celebrating. They are the material remains of home holidaymakers and day-trippers expressing a collective sense of release, as well as relief at getting to this point in a global crisis that has rocked us to our foundations since March.

The evidence so carelessly left behind could also be read as a signal of something else; that we are witnessing the unfettered return of plastic.

It never went away of course but, before the pandemic, the message that single-use plastic was linked to climate change and that it damaged habitats appeared to be hitting home. Businesses, food producers, supermarkets, and consumers all seemed to understand the long-term implications of plastic as a pollutant.

Ireland has reason to be proud of its own record. It was one of the first countries to introduce a levy on plastic bags in 2002. In a decade, that measure reduced the number of bags used annually per person from 350 to 14. Litter was also down.

In the wider arena, there was broad agreement of the need to tackle not only plastic but all waste. ‘Reuse and recycle’ was not just a jingle for the environmentally-minded, but a message woven into national and international policy.

Then the coronavirus hit and, along with it, the unrestrained return of plastic. Much of it was absolutely necessary. Plastic, that versatile, cheap, and available material, has played an essential role as a protector in recent months.

PPE, personal protective equipment, has kept our hospitals running and, for the most part, kept the staff working in them safe. When it comes to healthcare, keeping everyone safe is the number one concern, and rightly so.

But what now? Have we simply given up on the drive to reduce plastic, focusing on the crisis in front of us (coronavirus) rather than the climate crisis that still looms large even though it’s tempting to push it into the background? 

Plastic in all its forms — masks, gowns, perspex shields, gloves — is helping to making us feel safe, but that does not mean we should abandon the drive to reduce single-use plastics.

Nor should we slow down that drive, as the plastics industry would have us do. Powerful lobbies have already used the virus as an excuse to oppose legislative measures to reduce plastic packaging. Some US cities have even lifted bans on plastic bags while retailers are stopping customers from using reusable bags, fearful they might spread the virus.

The surge in plastic waste, due to the coronavirus, has already been identified as a major setback to the fight against plastic pollution which, according to the World Wildlife Fund, is due to increase by 40% in the next decade.

To echo the words of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, we have to remember we are fighting two crises — deaths due to coronavirus, and deaths due to climate change and air pollution.

So far, Covid-19 has claimed over 700,000 deaths globally. Every year, air pollution kills nearly 7m people, according to the World Health Organization.

That is not, in any way, to diminish the threat of the coronavirus, or to undermine the role of plastic in shielding us from it. But perhaps it’s now time to look at plastic the polluter as well as plastic the protector.

And it’s time to unmask the litter louts.