Plastics & Rubber World - September/October 2019 - 33

INTERVIEW

being serious material ﬂaws.
Althorpe continues: "What is excellent
from the aspect of industry is that it's super durable, super lightweight. It doesn't
use much energy to move around. It's
what people miss when supporting alternative packaging; increase the weight
and it's more expensive to move around.
Why are loose vegetables more expensive in supermarkets? Because they're
more diﬃcult to transport."
Asked if the BPF delivering a pro-plastic message could result in a negative
kickback, Althorpe says there'll always be
a proportion of people who will respond
with 'well, they would say that'. But in the
same way that the BPF didn't oppose the
banning of plastic straws, there will always be a need for disposable plastics,
particularly in medical applications.
"The thing is, if you can get rid of something, then get rid of it," he replies. "But
if you need it, you need the best, most
appropriate material. Then you need to
educate people so they understand why
things are being done that way.
"People need to understand what can
and cannot be done, and what they need
to do to help with collecting and getting
that used material back into the system. It's
about how people deal with what they call
waste and what we call a raw material."
A large part of this revolves around
changing people's behaviour. As an example, Althorpe says that he would levy
a "massive" ﬁne for littering. While he
understands that this might not be popular, there has to be a balance between
attacks on the wider plastics industry
and what people choose to ignore.
"I'd make it far more expensive to do
the wrong thing than do the right thing,"
he says. "It all joins together in making
the circular economy. At the same time,
you want an end-of-life strategy which is
easy to understand and implement."
The BPF has already been actively addressing plastic's negative media image.
In 2017, the RecoMed scheme, organised by the BPF and Axion, was awarded the Sustainability and Resource
award from the Chartered Institute of
Waste Management. Funded in part by
VinylPlus, the voluntary sustainability
programme involved collection of single-use medical devices from hospitals
so they could be incinerated or taken to
specialist landﬁlls. Having started in the
UK, the scheme has now been adopted
by hospitals across Europe.
This, though, is a speciﬁc stream of a
single type of plastic. On the consumer
side, the complexity of sorting diﬀerent
plastics types can be confusing, which in
turn leads to apathy. Althorpe says it's up
to the wider industry to address this issue.
"I'm hoping that this confusion will
help the industry with developing suitable solutions, while helping people to
understand there's a solution and it's
ready to be used. PVC had a lot of issues
when we were looking at recycling. All

that tech and innovation can be applied
to other areas.
"There's a point where you need to
think diﬀerently. Multi-material packaging is diﬃcult to separate. We need to
think of a diﬀerent way of turning that
into another product, using new processing capabilities. It's durable, lightweight and eﬀective."
He also believes that the plastics industry may be open to re-evaluating some
technologies which, while delivering competitive advantages, may have become
too complex in terms of sorting and recycling. "No one can stand still, changes
need to be addressed," says Althorpe.
He goes on to point out that plastic
is still easier to recycle than other materials, particularly aluminium. While aluminium is easy to sort and handle, the
material requires a high temperature to
smelt and reprocess, far higher than the
180°C needed to recycle PVC.
Althorpe isn't prepared to predict
whether changes to the plastics landscape could result in some companies
going out of business, he sees Brexit as a
danger to industry stability. This follows
the sentiment of the BPF membership,
where 78% think it would be better for
the UK to remain an EU member (twothirds of BPF members are opposed to a
'no deal' Brexit).
"[Brexit] is almost the deﬁnition of
a chaos engine," he reports. "You don't
know what to input, you don't know
what's going to go on inside, so you certainly don't know what's going to come
out the other end. Personally, I don't
think it was a good idea."
That said, Epwin Group has had
some limited beneﬁt related to Brexit.
According to Althorpe, a series of fabricators have spoken with the company
as they're more comfortable working
with a UK-based supplier to avoid any
post-Brexit supply chain disruption if
working with a European company.
Asked what he would like to see at the
end of his two years in oﬃce, Althorpe
pauses brieﬂy before answering. "I would
like to see that the plastics debate had
moved on to a logical, factual footing.
I would like to see the public and policy
makers better integrated with the BPF."
To that end, he would like the BPF to
better engage with local MPs, many of
which have multiple plastics companies
in their constituencies. To support that,
Althorpe says he would like to see MPs
coming to the BPF to get facts about
plastic and not basing policy decisions
on media reports or public sentiment.
"We can measure our engagement
levels with local MPs based on policy
decisions," he says. "I want the BPF to
be seen as a source of facts related to
the plastics industry, what should and
shouldn't be done. The BPF should act as
a hub for industry and education. I would
like to get that message out there, help to
get the facts straight on plastics."

I would like to see that
the plastics debate had
moved on to a logical,
factual footing

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