It has been a few weeks of potential Brexit induced chaos, which ultimately haven’t really answered anything and leave most people just as clueless about what might happen next as they were a month or more ago. None of that is really the point of this article but the way that large numbers of the British public have tried to communicate their views to government is.
Over the course of the last month 6 million people have signed an online petition to the British government asking them to revoke Article 50, and a few weekends ago around a million people marched through the streets of London in a demonstration aimed at trying to secure a second people’s vote on Brexit.
I’m about 2000km from London right now so couldn’t take to the streets but I did sign the petition, and while I was I took a little peek around at other petitions currently put to the British government and realised that maybe I should actually look a bit more often.
Of course many of the petitions are either unreasonable, naive, plain stupid or just impossible to implement BUT not all of them…
There are a few out there that really do have something sensible or progressive to say, Petition 232684 for example says:
“Today the Earth is at a crisis point due to our plastic consumption, and as a result, people in the UK are more willing than ever to engage in recycling. Yet so much food packaging remains completely, frustratingly unrecyclable. Let’s aim for the UK to lead the world with a 100% recycling rate.
Every day we send to landfill, to decompose over thousands of years:
Cereal box inner bags
Peel-off film (fruit and veg punnets/ready meals/yoghurt pots)
Almost all plastic supermarket fruit and veg packets
Crisp packets
Sweets wrappers
Chocolate bar wrappers
Styrofoam
Vacuum pack plastic
-to name a few
The British public WANTS to recycle but we can’t get away from the vast amounts of waste that poorly designed packaging creates- appoint people to design alternatives and the UK will thank you!”
The petition makes it sound so simple, just ban certain types of packaging and immediately reduce the amount of non biodegradable and unrecycled waste massively. Surely, it can’t really be that easy can it?
Actually my very cursory and brief research in the last half an hour makes it pretty clear that yes it can be and is that simple. There are credible, affordable, hygienic and sustainable alternatives that could be used for each of the types of packaging listed. If companies and individuals are not going to choose to use them on their own, then maybe it really is time to legislate and force them to do so.
As the British government is obliged to respond to all petitions that get more than 10,000 signatures, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs did just that. Since there are more than 100,000 signatures it also must be considered for a debate in parliament, no date has been given for a debate but I guess that parliament are quite busy trying to find a way to dig the country out of the Brexit shitheap.
Quite unsurprisingly, the response is seven paragraphs of nothing much, which talks about 30% of recycled plastic in packaging, plans to implement new restrictions by 2025 and consultations.
I genuinely don’t know if it makes me want to laugh or cry, we are throwing away huge amounts of unnecessary plastic trash on an hourly basis all over a planet that is already at an environmental crisis point and the government of one of the supposedly most developed nations in the world needs six years to implement some rules that will only go some of the way towards a solution in one small part of the world.
I am laughing as I type these final sentences because it’s a lot hard to type when you can’t see the screen through your tears.
The fact that this government in this case has chosen to summarily dismiss what is actually an incredibly simple, obvious and just very right suggestion should not discourage people from every corner of the world from creating more of them. It should not deter us from advocating for a better and more sustainable future, from teaching and protesting and raising awareness and creating political pressure to try and create a brighter present and future.