Minister Schauvliege, do not let our North Sea become a plastic soup

Over the coming months, politicians in our country have the ultimate opportunity to do something about the billion-strong stream of plastic bottles. With a deposit system, the stream of PET bottles is made completely pure and ready for recycling.

On our tiny planet, a million plastic bottles are sold every minute. The figures placed by The Guardian on its front page are staggering. If you were to lay all the bottles of the last two years end-to-end, you would reach the distance from the Earth to the Sun, the British newspaper calculated. This is a mega-business of no less than 480 billion bottles a year. Shocking fact: only half of these bottles are recycled.

Our North Sea is under threat

For Flanders, too, the figures are impressive: 1.2 billion PET bottles enter our market every year. The annual weight of PET bottles in Flanders represents 32,040 tonnes of plastic.

Because barely half of those bottles are recycled, tonnes of plastic end up in the sea every year. There, the plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, microplastics. Birds, fish and other sea creatures ingest these plastic particles. The Guardian also quotes a study from Ghent University showing that people who eat fish and seafood ingest 11,000 pieces of microplastic every year. Just as the polar bear is threatened by climate change, the North Sea and our mussels are threatened by the plastic soup.

Billion-pound business

To do something about those microplastics, we need to look at plastic beverage packaging, says the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.

The problem is that beverage producers make huge profits thanks to their packaging methods. They package their drinks in what is for them the cheapest packaging. You pay for it, drink it. But as for what happens next to those billions of packages, beverage producers wash their hands of it. 'Single-use', they say.

Not so long ago, things were different. Drinks were then mainly sold in glass containers. These returned to the beverage producer, were washed and used again. But glass weighs more and takes up more volume. Plastic bottles are cheaper for producers and supermarkets. Which explains why they have switched to plastic en masse.

Schauvliege can be part of the solution

Plastic pollution is therefore closely linked to the profits made by the beverage industry. We should not expect this industry to tackle the problem itself. In such situations, governments must step in to stop us from drowning in plastic. Otherwise, there will be more plastic than fish in the sea within 33 years. It is not some radical environmental organisation saying this, but the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres.

We cannot, of course, stop this global evolution on our own from Flanders. But every government and public authority will indeed have to do its part to get the billion-strong stream of plastic under control. This includes our Flemish government, in which Nature Minister Joke Schauvliege (CD&V) holds the key.

Wrong and right recycling

Recycling is an essential part of the solution to curb the environmental impact. But it must be done in a clever way to be effective.

The beverage producers and their organisation Fost Plus like to trumpet that 'Flanders is a recycling champion'. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

Flemings are generally environmentally conscious. Most people do everything they can to sort waste. They put their plastic bottles in the blue bag at home, and those bottles are recycled. So far, so good.

But OVAM's sorting analysis shows that only 2 out of 3 bottles end up in the blue bag. 1 in 3 ends up in residual waste. And a significant portion in public bins or in the environment. The recycling system in Flanders is not quite that good after all.

Pure raw material

The current system is also a missed opportunity from an economic perspective. After all, those PET bottles are an excellent raw material for making new bottles. But then it must be a pure stream of PET bottles. With the current blue bag system, that is insufficient. The blue bags also contain beverage cartons, which reduces the value of the PET bottles. With a deposit scheme, where people can return their plastic bottles to the supermarket and get a deposit back, the stream of PET bottles becomes completely pure. And entirely ready for recycling.

Reacting to The Guardian, Coca-Cola claims there is not enough high-quality raw material to make PET bottles from 100 percent recycled material. But at the same time, Coca-Cola actively fights against deposit schemes, which would yield precisely that high-quality raw material. They are therefore themselves the cause of the shortage!

Scandinavia and Germany show the way

In Norway and Germany, the government introduced a deposit scheme that is cost-efficient,

Over the coming months, politicians in our country have the ultimate opportunity to do something about the billion-strong stream of plastic bottles. With a deposit system, the stream of PET bottles is made completely pure and ready for recycling.

On our tiny planet, a million plastic bottles are sold every minute. The figures The Guardian placed on its front page are staggering. If you were to lay all the bottles of the last two years end-to-end, you would reach the distance from the Earth to the Sun, the British newspaper calculated. This is a mega-business of no less than 480 billion bottles a year. Shocking fact: only half of these bottles are recycled.