In the future, it will be said that we are all responsible.  It will be said that we – the consumers – should have done more to stop this seemingly inexorable slide into environmental disaster.

Companies will blame the people…

Consumers will be told that it was our incessant drive to own things, to have the latest and best of everything which is responsible for our predicament.   The lament will come that consumers could have acted first, consumers could have directed change through market forces; consumers should have stopped buying plastic goods, then the corporations of the world would have stopped producing plastic goods.  Companies after all are only trying to keep the costs down for the consumer…

The people will blame the governments…

Governments will be asked why they did not regulate against polluting single-use products.  Governments will be told that they could have stopped  these goods from being sold; they could have imposed regulations on packaging, re-introduced deposit schemes for glass bottles or legislated against Junk Mail.  Governments; should have acted in the best interests of the people rather than be in the pocket of big business.

The governments will blame the companies…

Governments will say that a single nation’s government could not hope to influence a global mega-corporation.  Government will claim that regulation would have increased an organisation’s costs and thus led to job losses, that it was the companies who ultimately chose what to produce, and it was never the place of government to control the markets…

All parties played their part, all were responsible they will say…

Drivel.

In the current political and economic climate however, it is clear that power no longer resides (if it ever did) with the consumer.  A popular refrain of the capitalist is that the consumer is all powerful, that through their choices the consumer drives the market.  It may once have been true but it certainly is not valid today.  Perhaps when markets were limited in their geographical scope, the power of a single consumer was visible.  Yet now, in our ‘global’ markets, where large corporations sell all over the world, corporations often have more disposable income than whole countries (the figures for 2015 show that of the top 100 ‘economies’ in the world, 69 are corporations).  Faced with an organisation which has a revenue of more than a large country, can we really continue to deceive ourselves by saying that the ‘market’ decides and that the actions of an individual consumer will have an impact?  Coca-Cola sells over 1 and a half billion servings per day worldwide – under such conditions, it is difficult to see how a single consumer can hope to affect the ‘market’ by electing not to buy a single bottle.

It is of course conceivable that a consumer could use other techniques to ‘influence’ their peers, the government or a corporation: if a single consumer refusing to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola will have little effect, then perhaps a greater number of refusals may stand a greater chance…  support for such action however needs to be sought and the recruitment of individuals to a cause requires that contact be made with each of those individuals, something which requires both time and effort.  In addition to this the individual(s) being recruited must also have the necessary time and effort to devote; and in circumstances where the individuals cannot consecrate the necessary time then clearly they cannot ‘act’.

In the case of plastic bottles, I personally do not wish to purchase any more plastic bottles.  I therefore try to avoid buying plastic bottles as much as I can, but the fact of the matter is, there are some products which only come in plastic bottles, so my choice as a consumer becomes to concede my principle or refuse the product.  In a book which discusses how to reduce your family waste to Zero, one of the mechanisms is to avoid buying cleaning and cosmetic products (since they are all sold in throw-away plastic bottles) and to replace them with home-made products using bicarbonate of soda and vinegar.  Fabulous, except that it is not actually possible to buy household vinegar in anything other than plastic bottles!!  As a single consumer, I do not determine the production values of the manufacturer, and as there is no (non-plastic) alternative on the market I cannot effectively change supplier to send a message to the corporation.

On this particular issue I have spoken to my colleagues, and we would all prefer to return to a deposit scheme or use glass rather than to continue using plastic.  They have held this same discussion too with their peers and all of those also share this attitude.  Although hardly scientific, this demonstrates to me the simple model that the commercial/ corporate world does not respect public opinion.  So even when there is a consensus staring us in the face, the ‘People’ can do nothing and those that have the power to do something, do little or nothing to act.  This can be seen clearly through the actions of mega-corporations such as ExxonMobil who use their egregious profits to deliberately obfuscate public knowledge in an attempt to maintain the dominance of their industry.  This stalling is then either supported or ignored by governments, who, concerned primarily with staying in power, give-in to political lobbying, funding, corruption and threats (of job losses for example).

The shame of it is, that it is precisely the governments who are in a position to act – independently of each other and immediately – should they wish.  Governments could introduce legislation which would ban the sale of anything in a plastic bottle; the effect of which would be nation-wide and instant.  Government needs to free itself from the pocket of the mega-corporations – it needs to restore its integrity and purpose.

We need swift, immediate and coordinated action, and this can only come from government.

In the future, if they say we are all to blame – they will be wrong…