Colruyt, Coca-Cola and Cristaline top Brussels canal pollution list

Packaging from Colruyt, Coca-Cola and water brand Cristaline are the top three most common items found polluting the Brussels canal, according to analysis by campaign group City to Ocean.

The group, formerly Canal It Up, said Belgium must take action on litter, such as banning double plastic packaging or implementing a deposit system for cans and bottles following its analysis of items found in Brussels canal.

It said all stakeholders – from government to business to consumers – should make this a priority.

The 3,500 items of rubbish collected by the group from June to August are, in the group's view, just a tiny fraction of all the rubbish found in the Brussels canal.

If not collected, the litter will end up in the North Sea before reaching the other seas and oceans of the world.

The Brussels-based environmental campaign group said that packaging from supermarket giant Colruyt, Coca-Cola and Cristaline were most often found floating in the water.

Water bottles from Cristaline, one of the cheapest bottled waters in Belgium, were the chief culprit.

The most frequently retrieved items from the water were plastic bottles (402), followed by snack packaging such as Mars and Twix wrappers (366), cans (329), plastic bags (316), and smoking materials including cigarette butts, packaging and lighters (209).

The vast majority of the top 15 are products consumed outdoors. All are single-use packaging or products.

Plastic bottles, cans, caps and labels from plastic bottles account for 27% of the retrieved items, the group said.

It added: “A physical deposit system could have kept these items out of nature years ago. The fact that we still find them in abundance is a direct result of lax government policy and resistance from the business sector, that have been fighting the system for the last ten years.

“Even today, during various government formations, it remains unclear whether a deposit system will be implemented and whether the business sector will be able to obstruct it with their proposal for a digital deposit system.”

The campaign group added that there had been “plenty of successful examples of physical deposit systems in our neighbouring countries [such as Germany and Denmark]”.

The group said that an effective €0.25 per bottle or can deposit scheme could help diminish the amount of litter found in the canal.

It would mean that far less of the "big three" polluters' packaging, mainly cans and plastic bottles, would end up in the water.

Plastic bags are another big problem – number four in the litter list – even though they have been banned at checkouts since 2017 in Brussels and Wallonia. But while they did disappear from shops for a while, they are now returning in a different format.

“Plastic bags are banned unless they are reusable and more than 50 microns thick,” said the group’s Pieter Elsen.

“So what have bag manufacturers done? They simply made bags that exceeded the 50 micron limit, and in fact nothing has changed. We still find just as many of them in the canal and just as many will end up in the oceans later on.”

City to Ocean also calls on businesses to disclose their plastic and raw material footprint, reduce their plastic and raw material use, redesign packaging to make it reusable or eliminate plastic and shift to more refillable and reusable models.

"Only by doing this will we achieve litter-free beaches, parks, waterways, forests, and oceans," the group concluded.

"We need to completely turn over today’s norm of a linear disposable society to a circular reuse society, where every package has value and multiple lives. It is time to break the recycling myth."