Editorial | Get real value from styrofoam ban

Having gone ahead, since the start of the year, with the ban on styrofoam food packaging, the Holness administration must now ensure that the policy intention isn’t defeated and that consumers, and the economy more broadly, don’t pay for a costly and embarrassing failure.

First, as was the case with the prohibition on single-use plastic bags and drinking straws a year ago, this newspaper supports the principle of the ban and the action of the Government, even though we believe that more could be, and ought to have been, done to explain the environmental merits of the move, as well as educate Jamaicans about alternatives to styrofoam.

A robust discourse might have highlighted the potential loopholes. And therein rests our unease, stirred by the observation of the breadth of the regulations that underpin the ban.

Last week, as the ban on styrofoam came into effect, two well-known environmental activists, Peter Espeut and Suzanne Stanley, raised significant, and hitherto inadequately discussed, questions about what will be its replacement. Their concern, or fear, is that most of what will be used won’t be biodegradable, even if it is reusable or recyclable.

“The substitutes that are biodegradable are the ones that environmentalists are recommending, not the ones that are non-biodegradable,” said Mr Espeut.

For, as Ms Stanley argued, “anything that is non-biodegradable is not really an alternative, because what we are trying [to do] is to eliminate the single-use plastic from the solid waste stream”.

In other words, they are concerned that, in the absence of the domestic recycling facilities, or a robust culture of separating garbage, non-biodegradable food containers, even if reusable, will meet the same fate, and end up in the same places, of their banished counterparts – in landfills, but mostly in drains, streams and gullies, headed towards the sea.

Unlike the single-use plastic bags, these containers won’t even have the value, after the initial use, of being utilised by householders to package garbage.

We, of course, hope that isn’t the case, for it would imply that the economy is being asked to pay a cost for nothing, or relatively little.

Indeed, the Wisynco Group, which used to be Jamaica’s largest manufacturer of styrofoam food packaging, has discontinued the line and cut 100 production jobs, on the grounds that even if retooled to make alternatives, it couldn’t compete with imports.

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In the face of higher costs for the packages, restaurateurs have begun to increase the prices for their goods.

These costs, of course, can be contrasted, or discounted, against the value – social and economic – of the damage to the environment caused by strewn plastics, styrofoam and similar material. On balance, it is likely, especially over the long term, to be very positive.

But those gains won’t be realised if the real impact of the new material is the same as the old ones. In this regard, the regulations on the alternatives to styrofoam require review and, if necessary, some tweaking.

We agree with Wisynco’s CEO, Andrew Mahfood, that educating Jamaicans about garbage disposal and enforcing laws against littering are important. So, too, is the need for the National Solid Waste Management Authority to do its job effectively.

But their failure doesn’t obviate the need to address and separate, and press home, the problems represented by styrofoam and plastic packaging.