Today is World Plastic Bag Free Day

[Badruddeen]

Single-use plastics: are you #ReadyToChange? via European Commission

Life moves so fast that we don’t always have the time to think about the impact of the small, daily choices we make – like using a take-away coffee cup with a plastic lid or accepting a straw with our drink.

43% of all marine litter polluting our oceans is made up of just 10 types of single-use plastic items; food containers, take-away beverage cups and lids, cotton buds, cutlery (including plates, stirrers and straws), balloons and balloon sticks, packets and wrappers, beverage bottles, cigarette butts, sanitary products, and carrier bags. As soon as we’re finished using these items, they often end up in the natural world; washed up on beaches or submerged in our oceans. This litter negatively impacts ecosystems, biodiversity - and even human health.

This can’t continue. We need to be ready to change the way we think about single-use plastic. #PlasticBagFreeDay

Read more

Check this out too. 🙂

Cheers

[PaulPavlinovich]

Hi @Badruddeen our three biggest supermarkets in Australia have all banned single use bags - one never had them and the other two big ones gave up a couple of weeks ago.

[Badruddeen]

@PaulPavlinovich That's very good to hear. Excellent.

Something to read:

Plastic bags and plastic in the Maldives is a huge problem. 

Is the Maldives doing enough to fight plastic pollution?
Environmentalists question the consistency of policies to discourage plastic consumption.

Cheers mate.

[PaulPavlinovich]

I usually notice @Badruddeen that the big businesses are doing the right thing by reducing plastic and using cardboard packaging (e.g. MacDonalds) but many of the smaller ones are still using plastics and styrofoam. Trendy places are moving into bamboo packaging.

[RashmiM]

@Badruddeen

I have replaced all plastic with glass and metal at home and doing the word of mouth advertisement whoever I speak to 🙂

[Badruddeen]

Excellent @RashmiM

That's the way forward. 

Cheers

[Badruddeen]

Yes Paul  @PaulPavlinovich

You are right. I like the use of bamboo. Bamboo is a good choice.

Cheers

[AmbrishVarshney]

Supreme Court of India directs Union and States to consider prohibition of use, sale and disposal of Plastic bags .in 2016..
after that lots work done in this case still lots of people use plastic bags but Indian govt doing good in this path

hope soon we see Our lovely County Plastic Bag Free and if you talking about me i always carry cloth bag for shopping and never take plastic bags

[RashmiM]

@PaulPavlinovich

Bamboo is a good option provided the numbers we cut get reforested as well. I am more worried about the packing as most of the things are either packed in glass or plastic. A large number of pharmaceutical companies are using a lot of plastic in packaging.

https://www.pharmapproach.com/plastic-containers-for-pharmaceutical-use/ 

[PaulPavlinovich]

The plastics in pharma are probably necessary @RashmiM as the medicines must be kept fresh and it must be obvious that they have not been tampered with on the way to the end user. I'm not against plastics in general, but I'm not a big fan of single use plastics when there are other reasonable options.

People need to consider their choices and make a reasonable trade off between energy, raw materials and water used. As an example a lot of people think that glass bottles are washed and re-used, the reality is that they are not. Plenty of them go into landfill and the rest get smashed to make new bottles. There is a huge energy input into the process which makes them less sustainable than might first appear.

Currently Australia is stock piling recyclable materials. They used to all get shipped to China but now they get rejected unless the are washed before they go and only one company is set up to do that. This will backfire on China because now our government is kick starting a recycling processing industry in Australia which will generate thousands of jobs and in a small way offset some of the tech jobs we've lost to Asian countries.

Some plastics do get reused into products no-one thought of five years ago. I'm a volunteer on Puffing Billy Railway and we've got 1.2 million wood sleepers under the tracks of the railway. Each sleeper costs around $100 and has to be replaced every 10 to 15 years if they stay dry, much more often in the wet areas. Two years ago we trialled ten plastic sleepers, five in dry areas and five in wet areas. That went well. This year about 1,000 of them went under the tracks. We won't be doing a major replacement before we understand how they last but its worth the experiment to save all that wood. The plastic ones are made up of ground up old tyres, recycled drink bottles and recycled plastic film. A new industry in our city is grinding up rubber tyres and plastics and blending them to make a replacement for asphalt. Various stretches of road have had this material applied around the city as a trial. We'll see how that goes. If these trials go well one saves old growth trees and the other reduces our oil consumption.

Regards Paul