By this time of year, after Guy Fawkes’ Night and the equinoctal gales, most deciduous trees have shed their foliage. The blaze of autumn colour – russet, gold, auburn – has faded to a sludgy brown mould, as the leaves return to the earth which gave birth to them. Yet a fresh display has emerged in the treetops on the edge of town – although you wouldn’t call it evergreen …
The Irish have a wonderfully allusive name for the runaway plastic bags which get caught up in the branches of trees: they call them “witches’ knickers”. Although particularly appropriate around Halloween time, they flutter noisily in the wind for months, and in fact often stick around all winter. Some of the shredded plastic comes from the construction industry – the shrink-wrap on pallets of blocks, on baths and radiators; flapping sheets of breather membrane in gloriously un-natural colours; and streamers of DPC. Just like fly-tipping, we’ve come to acknowledge, rather than accept, their presence in the urban landscape.
In the past, when a building site exhaled, it let go a great fart of cement dust, choking black smoke from the kind of “bonfires” which never happen on Fireworks Night, and an explosion of wind-borne rubbish escaping over a slick of mud. Now, with the well meaning but laughably-entitled “Considerate Contractors” scheme, the BRE aims to make Bob the Builder, with his cuddly image and can-do attitude, a reality. By cleaning up construction sites, making them quieter, and cutting down on waste, the notion is that building sites can be good neighbours. However, reconciling a politically-correct aim with the dirty and potentially dangerous reality of building sites is a huge challenge – although dropping the witches’ knickers is a first step.
Numerically, supermarket carrier bags are probably a worse culprit, and the supermarkets themselves are a far bigger bogeyman than contractors (pace Bob the Builder again) – but the problem is generic. Once it leaves captivity, the torn and flapping plastic belongs to no-one, and once trapped in bushes and trees, it's placed out of reach of the scaffies. It mocks the idea of designed landscape. It puts Nature into sharp relief, because it emphasises Man’s effect on his surroundings – which in this case, is all bad.
Retail parks often have high, wire-mesh fences around their perimeter, which collect plastic bags from the park's retailers – and nearby parks and woods are festooned with plastic, too. It's almost as if gorse bushes and hawthorn trees were designed to collect carrier bags. A litter warden may be the answer, although perhaps the supermarkets aren't bothered, since witches' knickers (also called urban tumbleweed) represent a huge source of free, if unwelcome, advertising. As well as the eyesore value, there's also the harm that plastic does to grazing animals and wildlife.
One solution lies in changing packaging material from non-biodegradable plastic polymers into friendlier alternatives. Nature hasn’t evolved bacteria which can readily digest hydrocarbon-based plastics, and as a result, they will take many lifetimes to break down, if at all. Rather like the attractive glass bottles which bottle-diggers salvage from Victorian rubbish tips, we’ll be unearthing plastic bags for many decades to come. Unlike the attractive glass bottles, including the fabled "blue Codd", no-one loves old poly bags.
However, as with many problems, there are several potential solutions. One is to look back into that Victorian past, into a pre-plastic era. We used timber boxes and tea crates as “closures”, with wood shavings and raffia rather than bubblewrap as protection for delicate things. We used hemp or manilla string and rope to bind these packages, rather than sharp-edged plastic banding. Perhaps with the oil industry going into reverse gear (see my last article), the process of taking up these natural, bio-degradable materials again will gain impetus.
A more serious step is to re-think the process entirely, so that we reduce the packaging needed in the first place. If you build in-situ, you need less packaging; if you pre-fabricate, you need more. Think about it: ready-mixed concrete arrives on site in a truckmixer. We've yet to see the onset of the disposable truckmixer. Bricks are shrink-wrapped onto pallets, using voluminous sheets of polythene. However, Modern Methods of Construction – such as factory-manufactured cladding cassettes, typically involve transporting large sections of envelope over large distances. To protect them (because the finishes are already in place, and are often difficult to repair if damaged in transit), they’re all crated up and protected with timber, plywood, polystyrene, fleece and plastic.
Today, shoppers are encouraged to reduce waste by shopping locally, and re-using a canvas tote, brown paper wrapper, or net bag, rather than packing their baked beans into free, throwaway carrier bags each time they visit the hypermarket. It seems that the construction industry is moving in the wrong direction. This is fundamental stuff, and in the end, it comes back to husbandry of resources – although in witches’ knickers I seem to have found what I was searching for in my previous piece – a lasting memorial to the Oil Industry…
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