Event Safety Insights Issue Five | Summer 2018 | Page 47

Gallagher Staging Eliminates Disposable Plastic Bottles Although April 21 marked the date dedicat- ed to our home, we should recognize every single day as Earth Day. One of the most devastating statistics of the mistreatment of our home is the rapid mass produc- tion of plastics. How much plastic will we produce? By 2050, we are expected to produce a total of 34 billion tons of plastic if the same global rapid rate continues, or plastic amounting to 100 x the weight of the entire human population (7.5 billion people). A disheartening July 2017 study on the production of all plastics was published in The Journal of Science Ad- vances. How much plastic becomes plastic waste? How much plastic have humans produced? Of the 8.3 billion metric tons of produced plastic, 6.3 bil- lion metric tons has become plastic waste. A mere nine percent of this waste has been recycled. Since 1950, we have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. Half of that was produced during the last 13 years. To give you an idea, 8.5 billion metric tons is equivalent to 25,000 Empire State Buildings (331,000 metric tons). In our step to be more green, Gallagher aims to drive a new environmental standard for our industry. In Feb- ruary 2018, Gallagher provided BPA-free water bottles for the entire team at every location. To eliminate the purchase of plastic disposable water bottles, we have installed water filtration stations at each location. Our Flowater filtration system not only eliminates our contribution to plastic waste, but also provides the most purified drinking water on the market. The station even notifies the user how many disposable bottles have been saved from the landfill since the filtration system’s first day of installation - over 1,500 saved bottles at Gal- lagher Staging over the span of just two months! Why should we ban the disposable plastic wa- ter bottle? Globally, 1 million plastic bottles are bought every min- ute - that’s approximately 20,000 per second, conclud- ed Euromonitor International in The Guardian. In 2016 alone, Americans consumed about 50 billion plastic wa- ter bottles. Where does plastic waste end up? 6.3 billion metric tons, or 79% of plastic waste accumu- lates in landfills where much of it will end up in the nat- ural environment & eventually our ocean. Between 5 million & 13 million metric tons of plastic ends up in our ocean each year. According to the 2016 Ellen MacArthur Foundation report on the future of plastics, the amount of plastic waste in our oceans will outweigh the fish by 2050. “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a dif- ference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” - Jane Goodall 47