Single Use Plastics in Ireland
Humans produce over 400 million tonnes of plastic a year and around 40% of that is for just a single use!
Single Use Plastics, or SUPs, are products that are made of plastic and are intended to only be used once before being discarded.
While plastic itself a useful material, and is even necessary in some cases, it does have negative environmental and health impacts.
Plastic is manufactured to be durable and can take hundreds of years to degrade. When it degrades however, it doesn’t disappear, it simply breaks down into smaller pieces of itself. This results in the creation of microplastics which can be microscopic! These minute scraps of plastic have been found in terrestrial and marine environments, in food-chains as well as in human lungs and blood samples.
If airborne, microplastics are capable of travelling immense distances and, since plastics are associated with a number of harmful chemicals, they pose a potential health risk in all regions of the world regardless of their origin.
In face of this, the EU published the ‘Single Use Plastics Directive’ in 2019 to reduce the prevalence and impact of the most common plastic products. It committed Member States to introduce measures to deal with these plastic products and, in Ireland, the Directive was transposed into national legislation in July 2021. Since then it has been prohibited to place the following SUPs on the Irish Market:
- Cotton bud sticks
- Cutlery
- Plates
- Stirrers
- Straws
- Balloon rods
- Expanded polystyrene single use food and beverage containers
- All oxo-degradable plastic products
Be aware here that not all ‘degradables’ are what you might expect. Oxo-degradable just means that the material breaks down faster but is essentially still a traditional plastic.
Even though plastics a are recyclable in theory, the typically small nature of single use items makes them more difficult to recover and recycle in practice. This means that they frequently end up in the environment as litter.
Despite the ban on making SUPs available in Ireland being in place for several years, there are still a small number of businesses providing them to customers. Some SUPs are made available for purchase while others are included with the purchase of other things. If you order food, for example, the package might include disposable plastic cutlery whether or not you requested it.
The best thing to do is to refuse to accept these items and seek more sustainable alternatives from the vendor or elsewhere.
Most retailers now stock more sustainable alternatives to the above SUPs and you should find wooden cutlery and stirrers, paper plates and straws (ever improving), cardboard cotton bud sticks and biodegradable food and drinks containers as being widely available.
You can learn more about Single Use Plastics through the European Commission’s information and resources on the new EU rules on single-use plastics.