How Not To Dispose Of Disposable Cups

Craig DalzellThe Scottish Government still doesn’t understand what a Circular Economy is or how to bring the public with them as they implement it. This has been made clear by their latest ad hoc and misjudged approach to dealing with disposable cups. Their consultation on the levy has been launched here and Common Weal will get our response in in due course, please make sure your voice is heard too.The proposal shouldn’t be as contentious as this and I should shouldn’t be on the side of fighting it – especially as I both agree with and support the goal behind the policy; to reduce resource use and waste produced by our single-use consumerism.The policy as it stands, a 25p levy on disposable cups purchased as part of a takeaway drinks order, though risks seeing people as consumers to be punished into doing the “right thing” even as producers are allowed to make it impossible to make the right choice.The key to their thinking lies in an exemption uncovered within the proposal that would allow retailers to avoid the levy in “settings where it may not be possible to clean a reusable cup”. An attempt from Chris Musson to clarify that exemption was not particularly clear but looks to me as if if the Government is assuming that you’ll always be returning a non-disposable cup to the place where you purchased the drink. If, for example, I order a coffee from a McDonald’s drive through, do I get an exemption on the basis that it’s not possible to clean the cup in my car?I do see where the policy against exempting cups based on materials comes from. They don’t want to get into an argument over whether a cup made of polystyrene is charged, bio-plastic isn’t, plastic-wrapped cardboard is, fully compostable cardboard isn’t etc, if any of these cups aren’t disposed of properly, they still cause litter and pollution – which means they do at least understand that the climate emergency isn’t just about reducing carbon use.But here lies the problem of applying the levy to consumers instead of producers. Imagine you are standing in a coffee shop and you have a choice of two cups.Option One is a disposable cup that will cost you 25p. It’s made from fully compostable cardboard but there isn’t a good composting network around you. When you’re done, you need to choose whether to throw it over your shoulder and create litter or to put it in the bin. If you choose the latter, and even if you put it in the recycling bin, the cup gets transported to Poland for incineration in a cement factory.Option Two is a fancy, oil-derived plastic cup that’ll cost you £5 but it avoids the 25p levy. It has the company logo on it. It’s a brightly coloured fashion statement as much as it is a drinks container. You’ve even seen folk online buying up the full collection of them. After you’ve used it a dozen or so times, the far-too-brittle handle breaks off when it’s in your backpack. The cup isn’t repairable. Looking at the markings on the bottom, you’re not even sure if the plastic is recyclable. You put it in the recycling bin anyway. The cup also goes to Poland for incineration.Which of those two options was the “right choice”?The answer is “neither” – it’s the wrong question entirely. The consumer should never be put in the position where those are the only options. The Circular Economy starts from fundamental principles. I made this same argument when discussing the ban on disposable vapes. An ad hoc vape ban or cup charge doesn’t prevent the next damaging product hitting the market. The Circular Economy starts from a product design point of view and should apply to all products in the economy. Do we actually need takeaway cups? If so (and unlike the disposable vapes question, I’ll assume so), how can we design the entire system to minimise resource use?This is a harder question to answer than it appears because the nature of non-disposable items is that they often consume more resources to make than a disposable version. If the reuseable version of an item costs ten times as much in resource consumption then it has to be reuseable at least ten times to “break even” compared to the consumable version. So it should be designed to last as long as possible. It should be maximally repairable. At the end of its life, the materials should be recoverable and usable for something else. If all else fails, it should be compostable or, if and only if not, the materials should be recyclable and there should be sufficient infrastructure to allow either to happen properly.But throughout this process, there should be a principle of Producer Responsibility. It is the producers who should be regulated to minimise their resource use and to redesign their products appropriately, they should maintain those products throughout their lifespan (by offering a repair service and/or user-replaceable parts), and it is them – not the consumer – who should be charged for the environmental costs caused by their products whether they are misused by the public or not. If carbon is the problem, then the producer needs to pay a carbon tax on every unit produced that they can avoid by redesigning their products to be carbon neutral or negative. If litter is the problem, then the producer needs to pay for cleanup and change their operations to eliminate that impact.Scotland does have a problem when it comes to doing this properly because full Producer Responsibility would require trade and carbon border tariffs on imported cups to level the playing field between companies within Scotland doing the right thing and companies outwith Scotland who can’t be taxed and regulated into compliance. But this isn’t an excuse to not push the lines of devolution as far as possible and to fight harder for those lines to be extended (all the way to full independence) and doing this from a position of principle rather than a position of creating single use policies for each single use product (have we mentioned the cardboard box containing the burger you bought with your coffee? No? Did you notice? Did the Government?) will mean reaching a coherent policy platform across the whole economy. Only then can we actually achieve our climate obligations and only then will we be able to stop blaming consumers for making bad choices when all they have is bad options to choose from.