FAQ

Q: I signed a petition, isn’t that enough?

A: My goal is to get people to actively send emails that require a response. There are some great online petitions asking companies to change, and sometimes these are successful (see Ireland’s Barry’s Tea campaign, where the company vouched to redesign their teabags to eliminate plastic following a campaign that raised 9,000 signatures).  But huge multi-nationals are unlikely to feel the need to respond to petitions, because even hundreds of thousands of signatures are only a dent in their customer base.

By flooding a company’s customer services/complaints email addresses with demands to redesign their packaging, you’re hitting the company in the pocket: the mails must be read and responded to, and that’s man-hours, which equal money. The difference between a company getting one mail saying they have 100,000 unhappy customers and having to respond to 100,000 customer complaints is significant and will drive an awareness of the need for change far more effectively.  If you copy and paste my letters and email them, it will only take a minute longer than signing an online petition and will have a far more powerful impact, so please climb aboard with me! Also, don’t forget to tweet me at @theplasticlett1 and @ the company when you have sent your mail, or let me know what types of responses you get!

Also, feel free to get in touch with ideas for ways in which big polluters could redesign their packaging.

Q:But what about all the other ways that some of these companies are harmful or unethical?

A: For the purposes of this project, I won’t be going into many of the other ways in which these companies are unethical.  I know that Tampax bleach their cotton, that Coca Cola and Cadbury are partly responsible for the obesity epidemic, that Persil contains substances that harm marine life and that Lidl keeps workers on  zero hour contracts.  BUT PLASTIC POLLUTION IS A MASSIVE CRISIS THAT REQUIRES DRASTIC ACTION.  So this project will politely thank the company for their services and ask them to make a change.

Q: But surely it’s up to the consumer to change their purchasing practices?

A: Most people in the world are living on a limited budget of both time and money.  Until corporations are forced to offer eco friendly products at the same or lower cost as their polluting products, these choices are outside the range of what most people can afford in terms of time and money.  Yes, wealthy people can and should “vote with their pockets,” but we must also reach critical mass on this: governments must represent OUR interests and corporations must learn that profiting from their destruction of the planet is going to end.

Q: I recycle and do Beach Cleans/plogging, isn’t that enough?

A: No.  Recycling is a PR scam funded by industry so that they don’t have to make real change and can constantly send out a message that the onus is on the consumer, that if only everything was separated better and cleaned better, recycling would work. Just take a look at Repak, Ireland’s national recycling initiative: Tesco Ireland, Coca Cola (the world’s biggest producer of single-use plastic bottles) and even the plastics industry lobbying group are represented on the board.

Plastics recycling is vastly inefficient and impractical.  Of the 6 BILLION metric tonnes of plastic that we have created since the plastics boom took off in the 1950s, under 10% has been recycled. Of Ireland’s plastic waste, only 36% is “sent for” recycling: since China stopped accepting our plastics over a year ago, we have no idea where these recyclables are ending up.  Add to this that corporations will design packaging to be memorable, colourful and eye-catching over and above any circular economy design considerations, and recycling is only a minimal part of the answer.

Beach Cleans take the plastics out of view and put them into landfill or incineration.  The ocean gyres that are picking up are waste are now the size of countries.  Companies like Coca Cola are more than happy to encourage you to feel good about yourself and think you’re making a difference by collecting their waste for them (Ireland’s Clean Coasts is actually FUNDED by Coca Cola!) but it won’t.  How could you collecting one bag full of waste per month from a beach make a dent in the one billion pieces of virgin plastic Coca Cola produces each year?!

Q: Isn’t switching plastic for other materials without changing our consumerist ways going to just cause other problems? (via George Monbiot!)

A: Yes, but we still need to do it.  Of course, we all need to stop buying shit and adopt a one planet lifestyle. 

All single-use WASTE should be eliminated.  But for now, alternatives to plastic are part of the answer simply because they can eliminate the production of more plastics, whose lifetime ranges from 400 years to “we don’t know, actually.”  Because of the vast variety of functions plastic has as a material, there are lots of different approaches to finding alternatives.  I’m not claiming that there are no ecological impacts from the suggestions I will make on here, although I will include reference to things like unbleached papers etc in the alternatives I offer companies.  It’s a start.