Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Justice and the Global Food Supply Chain by Hillary J. Shaw & Julia J. A. Shaw

Author:Hillary J. Shaw & Julia J. A. Shaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

4.7 Plastics Pollution

The world’s first plastic, Bakelite, was produced in 1909, about the time the first supermarket opened, the Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, USA, 1916, around the time Tesco began (1919) and Waitrose opened its first store (1904). Polythene came next, first synthesized in 1933. It then took around a century for the world to realize that the very properties of plastic that made it such an attractive material for manufacturers, retailers and consumers; its non-biodegradability, its resistance to water, its capability to be formed into almost any shape in any colour, including transparent (which looks to sea creatures like jellyfish and to birds like colourful food), would make the wonder material of the 20th century into the problem material of the 21st century.

Global plastic production remained negligible by today’s standards until the 1950s. In 1950, annual global production of plastic resin and fibre was 2 million tonnes, and barely 20 million tonnes was created in 1960. The food retail industry in 1960 used very little plastic; shoppers bought food loose or in sturdy brown paper bags. Materials packaging and transporting was in metal tins, cardboard packets or on wooden pallets to be sold loose, and the huge range of household cleaning and beauty products we have today that come in plastic bottles had yet to materialize. By the late 1980, the world was producing 100 million tonnes of plastic a year—a figure that passed the 200 million tonne mark in 1998. In 2015, world plastic output was around 400 million tonnes (Geyer et al, 2017). Housewives of the 1950s and 1960s shopped locally, little and often, and carried their purchases home in wooden baskets or string bags.

A combination of factors has driven up the amount of plastics used by consumers. The convenience of the car-borne weekly supermarket shop depended on an easy means of transporting large amounts of shopping from till to trolley to car boot to home; multiple disposable single-use plastic bags capable of carrying several kilograms of shopping each were the answer. The first supermarket trolley itself was produced in 1937 as an answer to how customers could easily move bulk grocery purchases, and the size of such trolleys grew steadily larger to both tempt and to facilitate larger total purchases by customers. Consumers also demanded more ‘sanitized’ and ‘lazier’ foodstuffs. They wanted meat in slabs in polystyrene trays, topped by clear plastic, rather than meat from the butcher they had to physically touch and cut. Cheese now came, not in a huge block from the cheesemonger that you periodically scraped the surface mould from, but in ready-cut slices in a plastic container, ready shaped to fit the pre-sliced loaf that also had to come in a plastic bag because, pre-sliced, it would not hold together like a traditional loaf would. Shoppers wanted pre-sliced onions and shrink-wrapped cauliflowers, rather than the earthy ones from greengrocers you had to wash and check for bugs. These ‘lazy’ foods could also be sold at a premium; ready-peeled onions, which need

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