Jenny Cottle
There is no denying it, plastic is the environmental scourge of the modern age. Bottles, plastic bags and fishing nets are amongst the plastic waste found in the deepest ocean beds on earth, and don’t forget the plastic being ingested by marine creatures and birds.
The problem is that plastic doesn’t break down – well it does, but not in a way that reduces its damaging effects. The particles become smaller, but they still do damage. In fact, recent research by Professor Richard Banati has shown that plastic, and the chemicals released during the breakdown process are “entering into living beings on the molecular level”.
Micro plastic, those small plastic beads in many shampoos, body washes and exfoliants are so small to begin with that they bypass filtration systems and easily enter our waterways, and so are frequently ingested by fish and birds. Apart from the risk to these animals, it then begs the question, are we eating plastic too?
The good news is there are many things happening to combat this.
First and foremost- reduce your use of plastic. Avoid plastic shopping bags, avoid over packaged products and avoid bottled water (in most western countries it’s no better than the tap water anyway so carry a reusable water bottle). Keep reusable grocery bags in your car and carry small reusable shopping bags when you go shopping in malls.
In some places in the world, authorities are helping which is encouraging. In April the EU voted to reduce its plastic bag usage by 80 per cent by 2019. In other places, if you want a plastic bag, you have to pay for it. I even found this to be the case last year in western China, in the city of Ya’an.
As for micro plastics, the Australian Royal Botanical Gardens have teamed up with Flora and Fauna International to develop an app to scan products to identify if micro plastics are present – so you can avoid the product.
The other major thing you can do, if you must use plastic, is recycle. In most Australian cities, kerbside recycling will accept all hard plastics in the recycle bin, and if your local supermarket will accept plastic bags for recycling, they will also accept soft, flexible plastic from packaging.
And if you are going to recycle your plastic, you need to support this process by buying recycled products.
Fortunately there are increasingly, many options to do this. Below are some of the recent interesting recycled plastic options.
Pharrell Williams, the author and performer of the wonderfully uplifting song Happy, has launched RAW for Oceans, which will make jeans from PET plastic bottles recovered after washing up on shore from the ocean.
Or perhaps shoes made from plastic waste? Although only a prototype from a graduate art school project, the potential is there. After recovering plastic waste from local beaches, two British students melted and moulded the plastic to make fabulous sneakers.
What about reusing on a larger scale? In Quebec, a living wall covering 198 square metres is supported by a hydroponic system of panels made from recycled water bottles and plastic bags.
Better options for petroleum based plastics are coming, but in the meantime, we can do our bit to minimise the damage.
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