‘This is a campaign we can win’

In a few weeks time, I’m meeting representatives from ten of the UK’s biggest retailers to talk about cotton buds. It’s niche, I know. I’ll explain why I’m meeting them, and why I’d like your help, in just a moment.

But first come with me, if you will, on an imaginary walk along the tow path under the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Marvel at the towering ridge of grey limestone which took shape some two and half million years ago. Be awed at the dynamic flow of the Avon’s muddy waters, the second highest tidal range in the world.

As we step off the path and onto the riverbank, cast your eyes upward to catch a glance of the gorge’s rare fauna and flora. A peregrine calls and circles overhead; the milky-white underside of the Bristol Whitebeam leaves catch the light as they dance in the breeze. 

Now look down. (SOUND OF VINYL RECORD SCRATCHING LOUDLY.) Your rose-tinted glasses of wonderment fall off and reveal the gritty reality of a nation addicted to single-use plastic. Hundreds of drinks bottles, many of them still with brightly-coloured liquids inside, lay strewn across the sticks, reeds and mud for as far as your eyes can see.

Then something else catches your eyes. Nestled in between the tidal bundles of grass and reed stems are hundreds of tiny sticks. You see the blue ones first, then notice some pink ones and finally, white. Those are all the cotton bud stems. Used once to claw out some sticky bodily extrusions, or wipe away a wayward flick of eyeliner, then flushed down the loo without a second thought for where they might end up.

This is why we’re here. As a plastic campaigner who really hates seeing our seabirds and marine wildlife dying from dining on bits of our plastic waste, cotton buds are my bugbear. They make up to 60 per cent of all sewage-related marine debris, with millions of them currently littering our rivers and coastline. Thousands of which are right here on the banks of the Avon.

Now whilst items like plastic bottles and food packaging may be a more obvious target, I see solving their problem – either through deposit schemes or new packaging innovations – as the long game. Plastic’s still very handy when it comes to food and transport and we’re some years off from implementing a deposit return scheme or adopting new policies in which we keep plastic in the economy instead of letting it leak into the environment. 

But cotton buds? Really? Do we have to wait years and have millions of them polluting our rivers and seas until we change our ways? No. Cotton buds don’t need to be made of plastic. They can be made, and in come cases are (namely M&S and the Co-op) made of paper. Paper stems are non-harmful to marine wildlife and, if flushed, are less likely to pass through sewage filters and out into open water. Even if they did escape, they’d quickly biodegrade, unlike plastic which can take up to 400 years to fragment into tiny microplastics.

‘But who the hell would flush a cotton bud down the loo for heaven’s sake?!’ I hear you cry. Millions of us, so it seems. And the hundreds of thousands of buds that do make it all the way to our water treatment plants end up in landfill, where they’ll leach harmful chemicals into the local groundwater. And let’s not even get onto the amount of fossil-fuels used in their production. (Waitrose estimate they’ll save 21 tonnes of plastic a year from switching to paper stem cotton buds! Which, thankfully, they’ve pledged to do by the end of 2017.)

‘Don’t Flush’ campaigns work, but only for so long. Research shows that the numbers of cotton buds being flushed diminishes during such campaigns, but go right back to previous figures when the campaign stops. So whilst we need to keep on educating people not to flush anything other than the ‘three p’s: pee, poo and paper’ down the loo, we must pull the chain higher up, so to speak. By removing the offending item at source we take it out of the environment, for good.

And that’s where you come in. (We’re back from our walk now by the way, in case you were feeling a bit cold, or grossed out from all the rubbish under foot.) City to Sea have launched a campaign to put pressure on the retailers to ‘switch the stick’ from plastic to paper. Johnson & Johnson and Waitrose have already said they’ll phase out the production of plastic stems by the end of 2017 which is brilliant news – and thanks mainly to the work of Scottish charity, FIDRA. But public support is needed now more than ever, to show the other retailers that we want them to switch the stick too.

This is a campaign we can win. Not in five years time, but this year. As with the recent success of the campaign to ban microbeads from cosmetics, consumer demand can convince our retailers to pull their buds from their bottoms – again, so to speak – and switch the stick.

We’ve taken four billion years to get to this place, to be as evolved as we are. Plastic’s only been around for sixty of them – yet every piece ever made is still in existence and it’s the second biggest threat to our oceans and marine life after climate change. It doesn’t take a Darwin to realise there are better ways to clean your ears out than with a plastic stick.

Please sign the petition at www.switchthestick.org. Cheers bud. 

Natalie Fee is an author, TV presenter and the founder of City to Sea.

Read more: From city to sea – tackling plastic waste