Our refuse mountain is growing - Let’s wake up on waste tsunami

THERE are barely three weeks left before Christmas reaches a climax. The idea that our great midwinter festival is confined to just a few days drowned in a tsunami of consumerism many years ago. One of the collateral consequences of our rapacious buying — even if it may be a bah-humbug one — is an ever-growing mountain of packaging waste.

A recent Repak report suggested imported packaging waste from online shopping has passed the 7,000 tonnes a year mark, and that this figure will grow by around one third every year. Startling as those figures are, they are only a fraction of the packaging waste generated and all of it has to be dealt with one way or another, at home or abroad. The coming weeks will show a sharp climb in the waste graph, so maybe we should be more circumspect about what we buy and be more conscious of the packaging waste, especially in food products, involved.

Those issues show the grand sweep of the crisis but conservationist David Attenborough, in his BBC series Blue Planet II, gave a more specific example. He showed an albatross chick that had died because it ate a plastic toothpick its mother imagined was edible. He urged us all to act to save the “future of humanity” — a call he has made many times. This can only be achieved in small steps and when each of us changes our ways. Being more demanding, and selective, around packaging is something we all can and should do.