World Environment Day: "There's a myth only plastic we can use for different things"

CGTN Europe interviewed David Bailey, Professor of Business Economics at Birmingham Business School.

Transcript

00:00And Sian Sutherland is the co-founder of campaign group A Plastic Planet.

00:06Well, if you want to really think about what went wrong, you have to go back actually a very short space of time,

00:12no more than 50 years, to look at when we started to use plastic.

00:17And what went wrong was we didn't use this incredible, highly durable, exists for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years.

00:26We didn't keep this really incredible material and use it for things that we want to last forever.

00:33No. Instead, we started to use it as the default for everything.

00:37We started to use it for things that we use for minutes, and then we chuck it away into a bin.

00:43So this is where it started to go wrong.

00:45So when you look at, really, the ramp up to these crazy levels of hyper-consumption that we see in so much of our world,

00:53you can really look at the invention of plastic as being the enabler of this.

00:59When you look at our single-use culture, where we think it's completely normal for us to use something once and throw it away,

01:06then you can look at plastic and think, well, that actually broke the model of repair, refill, rent, share, all of those things.

01:15So we have normalized waste, and plastic is the material that supercharged that.

01:20You have often said that recycling isn't the answer, but it seems like one of the solutions at this point is recycling.

01:28So what do you mean by that, and what is a better solution?

01:32So this myth that we, this real, you know, this placebo pill, this chimera that we have been subjected to,

01:40that we've been swallowing for many decades now, that recycling is the answer to the plastic pollution problem, is fundamentally wrong.

01:48The material is downcycled. It's not recycled.

01:52It's not like paper and glass and aluminium and stainless steel and all of these materials that we used to use before.

01:59Well, plastic is something that was designed to last a long time, not for recycling.

02:06So we need to fundamentally look at that and then also realize that if recycling was going to be the answer,

02:11then do not think that an organization as huge as Coca-Cola would have set up a system to get some of their 120 billion plastic bottles

02:21that they pump out every single year, that they wouldn't have created a system where they can get those back because they want to recycle them.

02:28No, they don't want them back.

02:30It's cheaper for them to use virgin plastic to make new plastic bottles.

02:34And therein lies the problem.

02:36There is no financial viability in plastic recycling.

02:40And in fact, this year, a new report has just come out.

02:44For the eighth year running, global plastic recycling percentages, which was at 9%, is now even lower.

02:51For the eighth year running, it's going down.

02:54You worked closely with innovators.

02:56Do we have any alternative materials?

03:00Yes, there is also a myth that there's only plastic that we can use for so many different things.

03:05And I think gradually that bubble is being burst and people are starting to realize there is a plethora of materials.

03:14There won't be one thing.

03:15We will never have one miracle material that can replace everything.

03:20But if you look at just something like cellulose, cellulose that comes from plants, it's the most abundant material on planet Earth.

03:28And cellulose is incredibly adaptable.

03:31You can make pigments with it, you know, coatings, dyes.

03:35You can make sequins with it, shiny little sequins that right now are all made out of plastic.

03:40But you can also use it to make things like molded fiber.