Across the globe, the prayer goes up from every nurse and doctor in the battle against Covid-19: give us this day our daily Personal Protective Equipment. The kit has to be discarded after every patient contact, because each one can leave the gloves, visors, aprons and masks covered with the virus.
So the quantities required are colossal: between February 25 and April 18, more than a billion items of PPE were delivered to users in the UK (875 million to NHS trusts in England). There is another term for this stuff, a term that has become a synonym for ecological depravity: single-use plastics. We can thank Sir David Attenborough (though not only him) for that form of stigmatism, especially since his Blue Planet II, and its scene of a baby albatross killed by the ingestion of a plastic toothpick, described by the presenter himself as “heartrending”.
But the planet’s human inhabitants are now relying for survival on the creators of single-use plastics, and especially polypropylene: I refer, of course, to the petrochemical industry. Yes, all these products (including the synthetic rubber of one-use surgical gloves) emerge from refining oil and gas.
So come with me now (as Attenborough might say) to one of the largest petrochemical plants in the US, Braskem, in Pennsylvania. There, 43 employees have been working — as The Washington Post reported — “12-hour shifts all day and night for a month straight, producing tens of millions of pounds of the raw materials that will end up in face masks and surgical gowns worn on the front lines of the pandemic”. Separated from home and family, these workers had all volunteered for a “live-in” at the Braskem plant, and have been paid on the basis of a 24-hour working day. These heroes of the global pandemic went completely unrecognised — until their prodigious efforts were recounted on local radio stations.
But what none of those reports discussed (and nor did The Washington Post) was the issue of disposal. This is rather surprising. We have been told for years that single-use plastics are an unmitigated curse, because of the way they fill the oceans and end up choking Attenborough’s favourite albatross chick: yet I have not read a single story in the British press, or seen on TV, or heard on radio, anyone asking where all these billions of single-use plastic medical items will end up. Have we suddenly stopped caring about the birds and the fishes? Actually, we needn’t be worried. As one piece of official guidance to medical users states: “Infectious PPE must go into clinical infectious waste streams, usually for incineration. This waste may be autoclaved and sent for alternative treatment like shredding and landfill.”
Yes, the UK has an admirable waste-management system. While it is true that many people have the antisocial habit of dumping their plastic bags on the sides of roads, this doesn’t mean the things end up in the sea. All the peer-reviewed academic research on “plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean” show that this country is — and was before Attenborough made the nation cry with rage against humankind — scarcely an offender at all: in 2010 we were directly responsible for 0.21% of the globe’s seaborne plastic waste. And coastal European countries (all 23 of us) were responsible for about 1% of the world’s “total mismanaged plastic waste”. The US was to blame for slightly less, just 0.9%. The developed world is, well, developed. It is true that many advanced countries have exported their plastic waste to less developed nations. To the extent that this has been a problem, the solution is either to reprocess more of this waste ourselves, or (as that official medical note suggests) use landfill or incineration.
Looking at the crumbling Lawson archive, I see that in 2007, when Gordon Brown was the first prime minister to declare anathema on plastic bags, I wrote: “Paper bags have the reputation of being environmentally sounder, but I don’t see how this can be justified. They require significantly more space in landfill, being much less compressible — and don’t they come from trees, which we are meant to be preserving as capturers of CO2?”
Did anyone listen? Certainly not the Conservative Party, which in 2015 brought in the charges for single-use plastic bags. In 2018 Michael Gove, then environment secretary, acclaimed the news that the biggest seven British retailers had reduced their annual transfer of single-use plastic bags to the public from 1.3 billion to 1 billion, and declared that the UK had become a “global leader in protecting our seas from plastic”. But as I noted at the time: “It turns out that more than a billion ‘bags for life’ are also being sold annually by British supermarkets . . . [and these] contain more than twice as much plastic.” The evidence suggests that the result of the charge for previously free single-use plastic bags has actually been an increase in the use of plastic. And the much-vaunted cotton bags? If it’s CO2 you’re worried about, the Environment Agency has news for you: in terms of emissions generated in the production process, a cotton bag would need to be used 173 times before its “global warming potential” dropped below that of the equivalent required for users of those flimsy plastic bags.
But Covid-19 has brought in a completely new calculation. Plastic so-called “bags for life” (or indeed cotton ones) are now recognised as a much greater potential transmitter of infection than ones which are disposed of after just one use. In parts of America, where a number of states had followed our path, there has been a screeching U-turn. Many state governors have suspended the ban on free single-use plastic bags. They have to a degree been reacting to the concerns of workers in the grocery trade: the union representing supermarket workers in Oregon has been lobbying for a ban on reusable bags, and another in Chicago called for an “end to the disease-transmitting bag tax”.
In the UK, the government has suspended the requirement on supermarkets to charge for plastic bags used for online grocery deliveries. It says that this is designed to “reduce the risk of contamination”. However, it says this relaxation “does not apply to single-use bags provided in store or for other types of online delivery”. So the government is actively discouraging single-use plastics in connection with food transfer and consumption, while buying billions of the things for use in hospitals. For self-contradictory idiocy, this takes some beating. It’s almost as if our politicians were taking their orders from Sir David Attenborough.
I say we should instead honour those working night and day in petrochemical plants: the truest friends of doctors, nurses — and mankind.
