Every week I am dismayed by the amount of plastic I deal with. What can be recycled goes into the Council recycling bin. I generally have a package of soft plastic that I deposit in the recycle bin in my local supermarket. The rest goes into landfill. It is even more worrying to discover how much plastic has been found in huge floating islands in our oceans, in the stomach of many animals and fish, in the food chain and now in the air as it breaks down into what is known as microplastics. Recently I read somewhere that it has been found in human blood streams.
Looking through various sources dealing with plastic waste these were some of many staggering statistics that stood out for me.
- Every piece of plastic ever made (since first produced 100 years ago) is still around in some form as it takes hundreds of years for it to break down and it almost never goes away completely.
- Soon there will be a greater volume of plastic in the ocean than fish.
- 35 million plastic bottles are sold in the UK every day (BBC)
- 30% of plastic is used for packaging.
- The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is bigger than Texas.
- Plastic waste had been found on top of Mt Everest, the highest point on earth and in the Mariana Trench at the lowest point in the ocean.
- Globally only 9% of plastic is recycled.
One of the more disturbing things I read was that recycling is not the solution as even recycled plastic does not go away in many cases. The only real solution is to phase out many of the plastics we now use, in particular single use plastics. We must move away from being a throw away society.
This year the focus of Earth Day on April 22 is on the plastic problem. There are 4 aims:
- To increase awareness of the damage plastic does to the planet and the life that inhabits it.
- To phase out single use plastic by 2030
- To cut back on Fast Fashion which makes use of synthetic materials.
- Finding alternatives that are more eco-friendly.
Fr Pat O'Shea resides and works in Lower Hutt, Aotearoa NZ
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