In moving Amendment 130A, I shall speak also to Amendments 130B and 141A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, and Amendment 139, in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. As with the various other amendments in this group, they seek concrete, practical steps to reduce plastic pollution, primarily by reducing plastic production. What is not produced in the first place cannot later pollute.
Amendments 130A and 130B seek to strengthen the Bill to enforce full transparency from businesses with more than 250 employees about the plastic they use at every point in the supply chain. We are not wedded to that threshold, but it is the same one used by the Government; for example, as a threshold for making declarations on the gender pay gap. A threshold of that order means that we are not imposing huge burdens on tiny companies but just asking a small thing of the large companies which are the primary plastic polluters.
UK supermarkets use some 114 billion pieces of throwaway plastic packaging each year. Anti-plastic campaigners A Plastic Planet have worked out that this equates to 653,000 tonnes of plastic waste—the equivalent of almost 3,000 747 jumbo jets.
This avalanche of plastic is not just in the packaging we take home with us from the supermarket. It wraps pallets of food in transit, and it sits on shelves, wrapping pretty much everything we buy, pushing sales while creating a toxic legacy for our planet. That is why Amendment 130B refers to
“primary, secondary and tertiary plastic packaging”,
which is the jargon, respectively, for packaging we take home, packaging used to promote sales and packaging used to transport goods before products make it to the shelves.
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There is a market leader in this connection. The Minister referred to it on our first day in Committee. Back in September 2020, Iceland called on the retail sector to join it in improving transparency on plastic use. Working with campaign groups, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, A Plastic Planet and Surfers Against Sewage, the chain has also called on the Government to use the Bill to enforce mandatory reporting on plastic packaging, and plastic pollution reduction targets.
The supermarket argued that, without transparent reporting and government-enforced reduction targets, we will not be able to judge whether business actions are delivering real progress in tackling plastic pollution. Iceland went on to call for retailers and other businesses to commit to publishing their total plastic packaging transparently, including both own-label and branded products. Although many supermarkets have signed pacts and pledges, they have so far failed to make a significant impact on the amount of plastic polluting the environment.
The amendments recognise that voluntary reporting in itself is insufficient. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ report, Breaking the Plastic Wave, released this year, voluntary agreements will see at most a 7% reduction in the forecast growth in ocean pollution by 2040. This is clearly inadequate, so reporting requirements with legal force are needed.
Consumers are consistently behind us in wanting a reduction in the use of plastic. They are inclined to buy plastic-free products and reward companies that seek alternatives. We simply need to give them more choice. These transparency amendments are therefore about empowering consumers to see who are the plastic heroes and villains. We can then trust that consumers
will vote with their feet, support the market leaders and, in doing so, encouraging the laggards to catch up. It is a neat solution, and I hope the Government will respond constructively to it.
Amendment 141A is more straightforward still. It deals with the scourge of plastic sachets. These little single-use, single-dose sachets have somehow slipped beneath all the single-use plastic radars and policies. The most recent global audit of branded plastic waste revealed that sachets were the most commonly found item, ahead of cigarette butts and plastic bottles. The UK has rightly banned plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds. Sachets must be next.
In the long run, the campaigners in this space want an end to all conventional plastic sachets, including for such foodstuffs as ketchup. However, the amendment is more modest, recognising that while we emerge from Covid, there are still sensitivities in catering environments about people touching the same ketchup bottle, and so forth.
A ban on cosmetic and household sachets is where we should start. Polling commissioned by A Plastic Planet revealed overwhelming support for such a move. Almost eight in 10 Britons say that plastic sample sachets should be banned in the UK, and more than four in five say that the Government should not ignore their impact on plastic pollution. There is political support for this too. In November 2020, some 40 politicians, business leaders and campaigners signed an open letter which urged the UK and EU to include sample sachets in their single-use plastic bans. Signatories of the letter included Princess Esméralda of Belgium, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, Peter Thomson, Iceland Foods managing director Richard Walker and Time Out Group CEO Julio Bruno, as well as 27 parliamentarians across party lines.
It is clear that this is an area where the UK, outside the EU, could lead Europe rather than lag behind. Industry knows that we should moving toward more and more refillable solutions, with consumers taking their bottles back to the shop rather than buying more packaging that is then thrown in the bin.
I also add my support to Amendment 139 in the name of the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, to which I have added my name. It amends the provision in Schedule 9 to ensure that charges can be imposed not just on single-use plastic items but on all single-use items; otherwise, there is a danger of shifting the environmental burden from one polluting material to another. The problem lies with the single-use throwaway culture, not just plastic per se. In fact, a recent Green Alliance report set out that switching all plastic packaging on a like-for-like basis could almost triple associated carbon emissions. So an inability to charge for alternatives to plastic might see the market switch to other unnecessary single-use items rather than driving down consumption.
I turn finally to Amendments 141 and 142 to 145 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. Again, these press the Government to make a distinction in their handling of plastics between compostable materials on the one hand and conventional polluting plastic on the other. This seems to us a pragmatic way to proceed, recognising that only by promoting a range of solutions—including
reducing plastic production, reusing plastics that can be reused, recycling plastics that can be recycled and composting—will we meet the demands of the plastic crisis.
Transparency from the supermarkets about their own footprint and a ban on the scourge of sachets could be two major contributors alongside the other amendments in this group. I therefore beg to move.