Plastic? What is that....

The rumblings about our waste plastic are getting louder! A BBC programme with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – Monday 10/6/2019 named War on Plastic was an absolute eye-opener as to what is really happening with our waste plastic. It is NOT recycled at all. It is just baled and shipped over to Asia, in this case Malaysia. A plastic bag that I use every week, every day to collect our household’s plastic milk bottles, glass and all other plastic waste was shown. Locally it is Rhondda Cynon Taf council, supplying plastic bags for our plastic waste to be collected because WE RECYCLE IT it says. No it shows they do not, they sell it on to a company or companies that ship it far away. I have often thought – what do they do with all these empty containers, left empty after Chinese goods, mostly all made of plastic, have been unloaded here to feed our insatiable appetite for trash? Ah, I begin to understand – some entrepreneur found a way – ship these bales of plastic waste in empty containers back to China or now Malaysia.

There is a big moral question here – are our hallowed politicians and political bodies like Rhondda Cynon Taf pulling the wool over our eyes? It seems so. And it is not just RCT but more bags were shown – virtually all supermarkets, other councils and more. So, to me and my jaundiced eye, councils resell or just dump it to a collection company who takes it away. Out of sight. Out of mind. There is me thinking my council tax goes partly to pay for the recycling effort. All they do is just sort it, keep what they want, glass probably and metals and plastic is baled and whisked away to poison people far away. Hypocritical? You judge. Frankly we are all to blame for allowing supermarkets and the like to pack everything in plastic. We certainly need very fast action, by everybody, consumers and authorities alike.

Otherwise we are just poisoning everything on this globe! The epitaph on the collective gravestone will simply say – Thanks a lot, humans. Grand job.