Ex & Hopp

Portugal’s persistent packaging problem.

I am standing at the reception desk at the Pingo Doce supermarket in Lagos with an empty one-litre glass water bottle in my hand. I ask the woman at the counter if I can exchange this bottle here. “No,” she says, “we don’t stock Carvalhelhos water, and we don’t accept deposit bottles from this company.” I ask if I can quote her, because I don’t just want to exchange this empty deposit bottle, I also want to write a story about it. The story is about Portugal’s backwardness when it comes to recycling and nature conservation. Every nation has its own peculiarities. Sweden, for example, introduced a deposit system for glass bottles and the associated law as long ago as 1885. Germany later followed suit, but the process took about a hundred years. Portugal still has no law of its own on bottle deposits, so what is no longer needed in this country is often simply tossed out of the window of a car onto the road or into the forest. Plastic bottles and cigarette ends. Portugal is the leader in forest fires in Europe, the European champion, so to speak, but not in football. Most of the rubbish piles up on the verges of the N22 national trunk road in the Algarve…

The other day, an elderly gentleman, a hospital patient, threw a dirty paper tissue out of the window of his ambulance and it landed right at my feet. I was about to pick it up and return the crumpled tissue to the ambulance, but I realised that this would have been a real provocation and might even have caused him to have a stroke. So, I picked it up discreetly later on and made it disappear. This is exactly the way in which many Portuguese people deal with disposable drink containers. Once used, for milk or fruit juice, or for mineral water, the empty container is thrown away: gone, out of sight, out of mind. ‘No,’ said the receptionist at Pingo Doce, the supermarket in Lagos, ‘You’re not allowed to quote me.’ But I was welcome to speak to the manager; she would call her. So, I waited for the manager with my returnable glass bottle in my hand. The lady came and took me with her to show me how progressive Pingo Doce in Lagos already was. And so we took a walk through the entire store and ended up in front of a box that resembled an ATM. She showed me the empty, unused plastic bottles on a shelf next to the machine with blue 0.5-litre, 1.5-litre, 3-litre and 6-litre plastic containers. It aroused my curiosity, so I picked up an empty 1.5-litre water bottle, placed it in a hole in the machine, pressed a button, and purified tap water from the municipal water system in Lagos flowed into the bottle. The water costs the equivalent of 10 cents per litre. It reminded me of once being at a fairground in my childhood, where they also sold hot air in bags, even though air was always free, just not ‘hot’ air. The trick with the water involves selling tap water to unsuspecting customers, which is supplied by Águas do Algarve for one euro per thousand litres (m³) with a profit margin that dwarfs and surpasses that of all other products in the shop, because, if I buy a litre for ten cents, I buy 1,000 litres for 1,000 times 10 cents = a hundred euros. What an intelligent juggler the inventor of plastic bottles at Pingo Doce is…

I am sometimes an inconvenient customer because I don’t necessarily participate in the consumer circus, or, in other words, I see right through it. It’s all about making money. I have learned to grow my own natural food in my own garden for many years. And I always buy mineral water in glass bottles that are always returnable. I am very selective in this respect because I do not believe in plastic bottles, which gradually dissolve into microplastics over time, so that, for most of us, recycling is just a euphemism. Plastic, whose main components are petroleum derivatives, always dissolves into microplastics when exposed to sunlight, and, because plastic itself has no value, it is thrown away again. This is not the case with glass. Glass is a natural material made from quartz sand, which occurs naturally and does not pollute the environment forever. Glass can be reused. With a bit of luck, plastic ends up in the Barlavento region of the Algarve at the rubbish tip in Porto de Lagos near Portimão, where it is buried in a mountain of waste.

Perhaps the plastic will also be incinerated, because the rubbish mountain has grown enormously in the meantime and they want to reduce its volume. And plastic burns well, because it is pure crude oil processed into chemicals.

To this day, the international packaging industry in Portugal has systematically shifted the waste problem onto consumers by attributing the responsibility for its solution to the personal actions of each individual. The packaging industry and its political lobby are determined to prevent the introduction of clear legal regulations and a deposit system in the packaging market. A deposit system on reusable packaging would spell economic ruin for the largest producer in the packaging industry, the Swedish Tetra Pak Group, because 99% of all supermarkets sell milk, yoghurt, cream and almost all fruit juices in disposable containers. This generates a lot more waste, because once the so-called cardboard containers with aluminium inserts are empty, they are thrown away, as there is currently no deposit system for disposable packaging. The situation is similar with mineral water. Disposable plastic packaging is being pushed onto the market by the petroleum and chemical industries. Now that electric cars are in vogue and less petrol and diesel oil is being sold, more plastic has to be produced. The petroleum has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

And when the plastic has polluted hundreds of kilometres of Portugal’s beaches, schoolchildren will surely clean them up again. That’s how you learn about the environment in Portugal. The packaging industry doesn’t care that plastic is found in the stomachs of dead birds and marine animals. The OECD in Paris knows all about this, because it wants to ban the production of further plastic by 2025. So far, its efforts have been in vain. Because there is a lot of money to be made from plastic. The plastics industry is powerful and protects its interests with widespread lobbying and a lot of cash. (https://plasticpeopledoc.com/film/)

There are basically two types of packaging: firstly, disposable packaging, mostly made of plastic and metal, which cannot be recycled, and, secondly, reusable packaging, mostly made of glass, which can be cleaned at ultra-high temperatures and then reused, making it environmentally friendly. More than 90% of such bottles are used by the Sagres and Super Bock breweries and less than 50% by mineral water producers such as Luso, Pedras and Carvalhelhos, among others. Monchique Water has long recognised the problem, but is taking its time to find a solution. So, the water continues to be marketed mainly in plastic bottles. Although… 20 years ago, Monchique mineral water – known throughout Portugal for its alkaline 9.5 pH value – was still available in glass bottles. And a supermarket in Monchique was able to purchase and collect its mineral water directly from Caldas. Now the supermarket’s parent company has to order the mineral water from Caldas de Monchique centrally. It is then delivered from Caldas to Santarém and from there back to Monchique. Why does everything in Portugal almost always have to be complicated when it could be so simple? Caldas is six kilometres from Monchique. Santarém is hundreds of kilometres away…

Pedro Gonçalves from Mercearia Bio in Lagos has had a similar experience. I also visit him with my empty bottle, which I want to exchange for a full bottle of mineral water. Impossible, says Pedro. “Neither water from Luso nor water from Caldas, nor mineral water from Botecas in northern Portugal, where Carvalhelhos mineral water is extracted from the ground, are available in deposit bottles at Mercearia Bio.

If a mineral water supplier were to deliver a load of mineral water in deposit bottles every week, would you gratefully accept it? Would you establish the deposit system in your organic shop? If a supplier came with returnable bottles, yes, of course. I ask again. Does ‘yes’ perhaps mean a clear YES? Yes, says Pedro.

Over the past few weeks, ECO123 has not only researched the regional market by making various test purchases between Lagoa, Portimão and Lagos, Vila do Bispo, Aljezur and Monchique; we have also examined ten different supermarkets and organic shops with regard to their recycling requirements for reusable packaging. ECO123 visited the French supermarket group Auchan in the Aqua shopping centre in Portimão and Intermarché in Monchique, the Canadian group Continente in Portimão, the Portuguese supermarket giant Pingo Doce in Portimão and Lagos, as well as the Mini-Preco and Coviran chains, the German discounters Aldi and Lidl, the organic shops Mercearia Bio in Lagos and the unpackaged organic shop ‘The Bank’ in Marmelete. I also visited Convent-Bio in Lagoa, but only found two non-recyclable packages of organic milk from the Azores on the shelf and no adequate offers for juices and mineral water. So, no luck there. That’s why we’re leaving Convent-Bio out of our story, as it’s not representative.

The same applies to the English supermarket in Portimão, The Food & Co, which has its English drinks, including fresh milk, transported over 3,000 kilometres from the United Kingdom to Portimão. Congratulations to Ursula von der Leyen on the carbon footprint of the business. Hardly any of the products in this English supermarket are fresh; instead, they are stored in freezers and refrigerators in the Portimão retail centre. I would be interested to see this supermarket’s electricity bill and its associated carbon footprint.

I was pleasantly surprised by another Algarve supermarket, which can be found in Almancil, Galé and Lagoa: it’s called Apolonia. I didn’t take just one bottle, but a whole crate of 12 empty Carvalhelhos glass bottles, and exchanged it for a crate of 12 full glass bottles of the same brand. The same applies to Luso mineral water in recyclable glass bottles and Pedras mineral water in glass bottles. These are available exclusively at Apolonia. ECO123 spoke personally with the store manager Tiago Araujo at his shop, and, on behalf of Apolonia, he confirmed that the three supermarkets want to automate their empty bottle collection this year, i.e. install machines with scanners where customers can deposit their empty returnable packaging and receive their deposit back in the form of an environmental bonus that can be redeemed at the store. Intermarché in Monchique is planning to do the same. So, there is movement in the supermarket scene and in the Portuguese packaging market on the part of the supermarkets themselves. What is missing is the commitment and competence of a legislator in the Assembleia da República, the parliament in Lisbon, to pass environmentally friendly laws and thus drastically reduce the volume of waste. Will the ruling AD coalition, a not very strong minority government composed of the CDS/PP and Social Democratic parties under Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, once again cave in to the packaging lobby when it comes to legislation? And how corrupt are politicians in Portugal when it comes to decisions that affect our environment? We will continue this story next week. Stay tuned…