broker deals which are sufficient to curb the climate crisis at the summit which will commence this week. “I think it can be done,” he said. “It’s going to be very, very tough, this summit, and I’m very worried because it might go wrong. We might not get the agreements that we need. It’s touch and go, it’s very, very difficult…”
The British leader shared these views during a question-and-answer session held with several dozen children on Monday (25 October), during which he also claimed that recycling more not an answer to tackling this global challenge.
“Recycling isn’t the answer, I’ve got to be honest with you,” he said. “You’re not going to like this. It doesn’t begin to address the problem. You can only recycle plastic a couple of times, really. What you’ve got to do is stop the production of plastic. Stop the first use of plastic. The recycling thing is a red herring.”
PM Johnson even went on to highlight the contributions made by Coca-Cola, as one of the dozen corporations which produce “the overwhelming bulk of the world’s plastics”. He noted that single-use items remain a critical issue and therefore called on businesses to find alternative packaging materials such as banana leaves, coconuts and seaweed.
Tanya Steele, the CEO of WWF UK, was also fielding questions with the British PM at the event, and she appeared to be taking a different view regarding the matter saying “we need to do a little bit of recycling, PM, and have some system to do so”. However, PM Johnson was adamant on his opinion that recycling is not the solution. “It doesn’t work. I don’t want to be doctrinaire about this, but if people think we can just recycle our way out of the problem, we’ll be making a huge mistake,” he noted.
