Very sensible but a baby step in the war against plastic waste.
Its use has exploded over the last 50 years. It is now taking 17 million barrels of oil to produce plastic bottles every year. Only one in five is recycled, so 13.6 million barrels of oil in the form of plastic bottles is ending up in our environment. Another way of looking at this waste is that one truckload of plastic enters the ocean every minute.
Recently, 10,000 volunteers across 42 countries set about a most ambitious plastic cleanup. 187,000 pieces of trash later, they have a comprehensive snapshot of how corporations are contributing to the global plastic problem.
The most commonly found plastic from global brands was from CocaCola, Pepsi, Nestle, Danone, Mondelez, Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Mars and Perfetti van Melte, in that order.
The call is always for individuals to do more, and there is always more we can do, but these multinationals are still selling us plastic drink containers and packaging that we have no choice but to throw away.
Plastic containers used only once and then disposed of, are part of the problem. We must use more glass bottles, paper straws and tackle supermarkets and other stores about over-packaged food and groceries.
One interesting initiative is the Plastic Attack campaign. A group of people go to the supermarket, select their goods, pay for them at the checkout and then strip all plastic packaging off the products, pack their purchases into their own containers and leave the plastic for the supermarket to clean up. World Plastic Attack Day is 15 September.
There needs to be more economic incentives to stop throwing plastic away. Many countries have a few cents which people can claim back if they return their plastic containers. One Asian city gives discounts on travel to people who deposit plastic containers in specially placed containers. Recyclable plastic coffee cups must be totally plastic, not lined with non-recyclable material. Neither are many coffee cups lids recyclable. We must make serious and successful attempts to stop the quantities of plastic finding its way into the sea. It’s predicted that we will soon have about 20% as much plastic in the sea as we have fish.
Unfortunately, the naysayers and the climate deniers are no help. They just want to continue raping and pillaging our environment as long as they can. To hell with our children and grandchildren, they seem to think. We don’t inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children. We must act before it is too late.
One of my favourite environmental authors, Gus Speth, has summed it up like this, “I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don’t know how to do that.” (JOHN ELLIOTT)