ROOM 111: Inflatable plastic clappers are a scourge on the game and the environment

This week, TANYA ALDRED presents her case for why those pesky applause sticks must be banished to The Cricketer's vault for the next 1,000 years

Some seven million years ago, humans and chimpanzees diverged.

The chimpanzee evolved for life in the trees, swinging merrily away, palm after palm, with a tail thrown in for good measure. Early humans were bipedal and lived on the ground. Stone age man's hand – with its long opposable and dexterous thumb – was able to create some remarkable stone tools, throw a good punch, pick up and use a club, as well as even dabble in cave art.

Jump forward through the millennia and human hands now do many wonderful things, from complex eye surgery to programming computers. But they also continue to do the basics: move food to the mouth, comfort fellow humans in distress, and clap.

Clapping is an almost universal expression of human approval, dating back to at least the third century BC. At school plays, conferences, operas, concerts, political rallies, we express our joy by breaking into a jolly good round of applause.

However, it seems cricket knows better.

^{This young Northamptonshire fan looks unimpressed by the inflatable freebies}

Increasingly, cricket authorities – or, perhaps more accurately, their corporate sponsors – have decided that clapping with hands is no longer good enough. Instead cricket fans should clap with small inflatable tubes – known as applause sticks – which are thrust into spectators' hands as they enter the ground.

Not only are these sticks plastic, but they come wrapped in their own plastic bag and come complete with their own plastic straws – increasingly banned in bars and restaurants – with which to blow up the entire dreadful contraption.

There is no recycling advice on the packaging, because they can't be recycled.

The sticks might be half-heartedly blown up before being discarded, because the actually the whole contraption is quite difficult to manage. In a best-case scenario they might be briefly banged together before being forgotten about, because in the excitement of a game, who wants to bend down and pick up some plastic sticks when they have something perfectly designed for the job attached to the end of the arms?

^{Sponsor-branded inflatable bats appeared throughout this summer's World Cup}

As the players leave the pitch, the plastics bags, the plastic straws and the applause sticks themselves will be chucked in the bin, unloved, unremembered, unnecessary, where they will pollute the environment for the next 1,000 years.

The world has manufactured more plastic in the last decade than in the whole of the previous century, and 60 to 70 per cent of it will sink to the bottom of the ocean where it will break into tiny pieces and enter the food chain.

Cricket's adoption of applause sticks is an example of mindless, thoughtless consumption to the benefit of nobody at all. Chuck 'em in Room 111 forever where they can decay toxically with shrink-wrapped bananas and self-lacing trainers.

OTHER NOMINATIONS FOR ROOM 111

• Isabelle Westbury: Birthday wishes for everyone and their mothers makes for unbearable social media
• Nick Howson: Tardy fans ruin the perception of cricket and insult those less fortunate
• Mark Baldwin: The three cricketing laws which need to go
• Thomas Blow: Bad light makes for bad publicity

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