Escalating plastics crisis: Dodging the challenge of our time

Every generation faces a challenge that defines it, one that means it either changes its ways or accepts that the challenge cannot be immediately resolved.

Such a shying away from the inevitable always carries a price, one that means the difficulty, whatever it might be, must be resolved sooner or later. In the meantime, it will continue to exact its ransom.

In the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s polio and tuberculosis, both nasty, highly infectious diseases, demanded attention. Both were brought under control and are almost unknown today.

The terrible impact those diseases had is almost beginning to fade from living memory. Concerted Government and public action succeeded in eliminating sickness and sorrow.

A later generation had to face down the challenge and bottomless war chests of the tobacco giants happy to kill their customers.

Cancer was — or is — the other side of that coin and tremendous progress has been made in how cancers are treated. What was once almost an immutable death sentence has become an everyday if demanding medical procedure.

Climate destruction and how we might, even at this 11th hour, slow it is the challenge of our time. Despite that, a series of half-hearted, ambiguous responses — “derogations” — from Government suggest that, like the tobacco advocates of the 1970s and 1980s, our politicians have turned their backs on the greatest reality and threat of this era.

The disastrously unsustainable Food Wise 2025 is a perfect example of this head-in-the-sand cowardice.

Today we report on three families who have taken a proactive, committed position on reducing domestic waste, particularly plastic waste.

They want to be better citizens and reduce the impact their behaviour has on our world.

In a world where a million plastic bottles are sold every minute, in a world where the incumbent of the White House reverses the plastic bottle ban in America’s national parks, this may seem a pointless exercise in virtue signalling but it is, in reality, how we might begin to avert catastrophe; plastic bottle by plastic bottle, food wrapper after food wrapper.

It is 16 years since Ireland confronted the terrible littering caused by plastic bags.

A stiff levy — 22c a bag now — brought about an immediate 90% fall in their use. What a pity we did not build on that success.

The mounting evidence around the threat posed to our oceans by plastics, the growing mountain of plastic waste so mammoth that the world’s recycling industry cannot keep pace means real action cannot be long-fingered again. The time for “derogations” is long past.

Some countries have successful refund schemes for plastic bottles where up to €1 a bottle is refunded when an empty bottle is returned, sometimes to a vending machine. Of course it would be better not to use them at all — in many instances, they are no more than fashion props.

Even in this gloomy scenario maybe we have more power than we imagine.

Concerted action by consumers who refuse to buy products because of packaging would be a game changer.

So too would be a new insistence that our Government face down the lobbies that, if their plans are realised, will do even more damage to the environment.