Thriving in a Globalised World - a Strategy for Britain (Shas Sheehan )

Thriving in a Globalised World - a Strategy for Britain

September 27, 2009 6:15 PM
By Shas Sheehan in Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference 2009

"I would like to speak on lines 58 and 59 ["Conference welcomes proposals to promote sustainable production, consumption and trade by analysing product supply chains in order to identify the opportunities for reducing resource use, and providing support for industry initiatives to reduce resource use and pollution"].

I particularly welcome the proposal to promote sustainable production, consumption and trade by analysing product supply chains.

Here in the West we are guilty of wasting obscene amounts of food. About one third of the food on supermarket shelves goes straight into our bins.

Quite a lot never even makes it to homes but is binned at the supermarket. Yet there is a huge amount of energy embedded in that food.

To cultivate a seed requires the use of a most precious resource - water. Also needed are chemicals such as fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides - large amounts of which end up as pollutants in the environment. Add to that the energy needed to harvest, process, package (how they love to package!), and transport to the supermarket shelf.

That is just for vegetables. To produce meat for our supermarket shelves you can multiply that several times.

In order to take a more responsible line on promotion and packaging we must start at the very top of the supply chain. This motion would allow us to do that.

At a local level we can start an awareness campaign of how truly criminally wasteful our current practices are and lobby our councils; after all, the onus is on them to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfill. They have a huge incentive, with landfill charges set to rocket.

Sadly, the focus on avoiding punitive landfill charges seems to be on diverting waste from landfill to new generation incinerators and anaerobic digesters in order to generate energy from waste. We will end up with a scenario in which food, which has taken a great deal of energy and resources to produce, being used as fuel - a preposterous situation!

The aim of all councils must be to minimise waste, in order that what remains as residual waste for landfill, anaerobic digesters and incinerators is the barest minimum.

Have we learnt nothing from the biofuels debacle, the production of which, in the clutches of powerful farming lobbies and corporations, quickly became a pariah for environmentalists? Let's not make the same mistake with energy from waste.

Anaerobic digestion has an important contribution to make in reducing the amount of methane (more than 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) given off by organic waste in landfill, but only once we have minimal waste.

In conclusion, I think that the masterful wording of lines 58 and 59 allows this and other outrages in the supply chains from production to the home to be addressed.

Indeed, the whole motion deserves to be carried without reservation.

Ends