### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 1st. October 2024 ###
Dear Editor,
I read Sandra Laville’s article (The Guardian, 1 October 2024, link below) on the supermarkets’ schemes for plastic return and recycling (or burning) and also share the skepticism of some of the contributors.
My belief is that, rather than recycling, it should be re-use (e.g. with glass jars and bottles wherever possible) that is the mainstay with us using taxation to progressively eliminate the majority of plastic packaging. For example, once the packaging-tax on your “TV Dinner” becomes high enough, you will simply prepare your own meal rather than buying a packaged one. Job done!
While excessive plastic packaging is a terrible (and very avoidable) scourge, there are other even more perfidious forms of plastic waste which are both right under our noses and also right up them …
The first is abrasion from tyre-tread with trucks and cars in Germany alone generating over one hundred thousand tonnes of this invisible, toxic microplastic each year. This poisonous particulate-matter wafts around in our streets, being breathed in by us, until it eventually lands and is then either absorbed by the soil or washed down the drain where it goes to form 28%* of all ocean microplastic. Second only to fluff from the routine washing of synthetic clothing, clocking in at 35%* of ocean microplastic.
So basically, yes, let’s sort out the packaging problem but not forget that the plastic that we don’t see is probably significantly more dangerous than that which we do see.
PS: My suggested solution would be …
a.) a permanent 50 km/h (or less) speed-limit on ALL roads with us putting freight and people on the rails and switching to local commerce. That is to say: Less speed and shorter distances means less abrasion.
b.) a switch away from synthetic clothing to natural (hard-wearing and bio-degradable) clothing.
Yours,
Alan Mitcham
Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/01/soft-plastic-collected-for-recycling-burned-tesco-sainsburys-campaigners
Link to article on ocean microplastic: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/25/plastic-in-the-depths-how-pollution-took-over-our-oceans
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