What a Waste
Each morning before work, I take some exercise. Today my walk took me past a children’s play area and this mess. It is absolutely wrong that the community should be defiled like this, but why does this happen?
Let’s think about this situation in terms of the actors involved.
The local council.
The town council have a remit to keep the streets and public areas clean and they employ staff to do this. But is it reasonable to expect that they will be present 24 hours a day? Not really.
The consumers.
People do throw away fast wrappers in an irresponsible way, I have seen them do this. But all this rubbish was strewn around a bin. It may have been disposed of properly in the bin, but then scavenging animals like crows and foxes may have pulled the wrappers out of the bin whilst searching for food. The consumers can’t be blamed entirely.
The sellers.
Pretty much all this rubbish was fast food wrappers from KFC, Costa and Mcdonald’s. All these companies sell food in throwaway packaging. It could be argued that they entice customers to buy throwaway packaging by including food in the deal. Once the food and the packaging are out of the seller’s door, they have no further involvement with it. This means that nearly all the costs of presenting the food for consumption have been externalised. The seller does not pay for plates and cutlery, does not pay to clear them from tables, does not pay to wash them or store them. So who does pay? The public sector. The local authority bears the cost of emptying public litter bins, picking up litter and emptying household waste bins with KFC, Costa and Mcdonald’s products inside.
A policy of deliberately generating large quantities of waste has been used by the fast food industry to maximise profit at the expense of the public sector and the quality of public open spaces.
There is so much wrong with such a policy. Waste is deliberately generated to increase profit. That waste goes into the already massive waste stream of contemporary society. A stream consisting of emissions from vehicles, microplastics, landfill sites; pollution of farmland, urban spaces, rivers and the sea. It’s a squalid, wasteful business and yet it is all avoidable.
I recently spent a week in Cassis in the South of France. It’s a beautiful town and there is no litter. There are many restaurants but no fast food outlets. If you want to eat, you sit down and eat off a plate. The culture is totally different. Whilst culture can’t be copied and pasted from one place to another, a positive culture can be used as a basis for positive change. Suppose the default response from local authorities to planning applications for new fast food outlets was “no”. Suppose also that the law was changed to support local authorities in those decisions. No opportunity for large chains to overturn decisions at appeal. Suppose that existing fast food outlets were given two years to transition to an eat-off-a-plate model. Failure to transition would result in the withdrawal of planning permission.
All this is possible and desirable. It can be justified by the improvement in public spaces and the removal of the undue burden on local authorities to clean up after the fast food industry. Nothing is just the way it is. Our collective lives are shaped by customs, laws and culture. We can change all these for the better.
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