The Plastic Hierarchy

Why are some things made of plastic anathema, while others are increasingly welcomed with open arms?

In May 2019, Britain - or at least a politician called Michael Gove who was Environment Secretary at the time - got in a wild panic about plastic straws and plastic stemmed cotton buds and banned them for all but medical use. Now, if you want to buy plastic straws in the UK, you can still do so - but only at a pharmacist.

I don’t use straws much, so the decision hasn’t really affected me. As I have always tried to avoid plastic wherever possible, because I think it is ugly and I imagine that its manufacture involves factories hidden away somewhere (probably China) belching out smoke that I would not wish to breathe, I am glad about any push to avoid plastic.

However, what I cannot comprehend is the focus on these two relatively rarely used items, while plastic objects are increasing in almost every other area of life. For instance, it has just been the season for strawberries. When I was a child you could only buy them in little woven raffia punnets - now they come almost exclusively in hard plastic boxes. Once, if you bought fish or meat, it would be wrapped up in paper - now most meat and fish bought in the Western world is sold in plastic containers.

In the bathroom too, plastic has been making inroads. Have you noticed that toothpaste tubes, which used to be made of some kind of flexible metal, have suddenly become exclusively plastic? And no one - even my most extreme green friends - seems to buy solid soap anymore. Everywhere I go, bars of soap have been replaced in bathrooms and kitchens by plastic pump-action bottles filled with so-called liquid soap. Washing liquids similarly have superseded washing powder and as a result countless plastic bottles are manufactured, where once cardboard boxes were fine.

If plastic is noxious and our plastic cast-offs are filling the ocean in alarming quantities, our leaders ought to be looking at plastic usage much more widely. Leaving aside the question of whether banning anything is acceptable - rather than educating people not to want the item in question - banning a few straws and a couple of cottonbuds is pathetic tokenism and typical of the second-rate way in which we are governed now. While Michael Gove virtue-signalled with cotton buds and straws, he distracted us from the mountains of plastic that are creeping into every nook and cranny of our lives.

It doesn’t make any sense.