This Environment Bill is major legislation and a mark of this Government’s commitment to our environment and combatting climate change – as the Prime Minister himself said it is a ‘lodestar by which we will guide our country towards a cleaner and greener future’.
Leaving the European Union has provided this country, under this Conservative Government, a chance to radically improve environmental policy and to put the environment at the heart of the policymaking process.
This Bill is the flagship of a wider package of Defra legislation, including the Agriculture and Fisheries Acts, which seeks to deliver on the Government’s pledge to leave the environment in a better state than it inherited it.
Amendment NC11 on Environmental targets for plastic pollution has been brought by my Hon Friend, the member for West Dorset and this is what I would like to focus my comments on today.
Plastic pollutes land, oceans and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its lifecycle, from its production to its refining and the way it is managed as a waste product. The scourge of plastic waste – the litter we seen in our seas, on our beaches, our streets, pavements and roadsides takes hundreds of years to decompose, contaminating our soil and water. The toxic chemicals used to manufacture plastic gets transferred to animal tissue eventually entering the human food chain, risking our health.
In my constituency of Beautiful Hastings and Rye, we have a number of stunning beaches at Camber, Winchelsea, Pett and Hastings; plastic – single use plastic such as straws, cups, bottles, bags blight all parts of our environment. Litter picking groups such as Hastings Beach Clean, Tidy up St Leonards and River Rother Clean up pick up bag loads of plastic every time they go out.
There is no doubt that this Government has taken the plastic challenge seriously and in 2018 published a Resources and Waste Strategy. Some Conservative plastic measures include:
A ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds, and a ban on microbeads;
Leading global efforts to tackle this ocean pollution through support of the G7 Oceans Plastics Charter, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy, the Commonwealth Blue Charter and launching the Commonwealth Clean Ocean Alliance alongside Vanuatu, encouraging its 25 member countries to take steps to eliminate avoidable single-use plastics;
A doubling of the existing requirement on large retailers to charge 5p for single use plastic carrier bags, which has seen plastic bag sales down 90% since its introduction.
The Bill includes a range of measures to tackle plastic use and disposal, for example, new charges on single-use plastics and a new Deposit Return Scheme. This should incentivise consumers to choose more sustainable products over plastic ones. There will also be new powers to ensure producers take responsibility for their waste, as well as powers to ensure a consistent approach to recycling, tackle waste crime, and more effectively enforce littering offences.
This amendment seeks to work with the grain of the measures already set out in the Bill to end systemic overproduction and consumption of polluting plastics and non-essential single-use items.
However, it would also require the Government to set specific targets to reduce plastic pollution and reduce the volume of non-essential single-use plastic products sold by a designated date and it is for this reason that I ask you to support this measure.