The Cold Water Shock of a Hot Environmental Topic by Ildiko Scurr
This month I feel I have a duty to write about a topic which affects us all globally. Life Grid is a global magazine so this topic feels very appropriate. It is about plastic and especially plastic packaging.
In November last year, the BBC ran a wildlife documentary series called Blue Planet, narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Viewers were stunned by the images of what is happening in our oceans. Birds dying because their legs get tangled in plastic bags, whales dragging plastic rope for miles because they can’ t get free and sea turtles and albatrosses eating plastic pellets and perishing from hunger. It made a very ugly picture.
As human beings we create incredible tons of waste that doesn’ t degrade and is choking the natural world. Animals suffer due to our need to have plastic containers for everything in our modern world. There is actually a plastic island in the Pacific Ocean. The great Pacific Garbage Patch was de-scribed in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States. Estimates of its size range from 700,000 to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres. The water degrades the plastic into smaller and smaller particles and it is eaten by tiny aquatic or-ganisms.
The good news is that people are waking up to the need to do something drastic about it. Last year Iceland supermarket announced they are phasing out own brand plastic packaging. The expectation is that other supermarkets will start to follow suit.
Plastic has become a hot environmental topic. Dorset is taking action. Dorset County’ s coastline is visited my thousands of tourists during the summer months. They are often not concerned about the litter they leave behind. Each year a Great Dorset Beach Clean is or-ganised. 22 beaches were cleaned as part of the 2017 Great Dorset Beach Clean, involving over 425 volunteers spending several hours to litter pick Dorset’ s coasts, retrieving just over 330 bags of litter from Christchurch to Lyme Regis. That’ s 145 kilometres. become the new sewage. There is a highly active branch in Bournemouth, organising beach cleans, educating people about the dangers of plastic pol-lution and what to do about reducing it and campaigning for laws to prevent it. Living close to the beach means that many people here are aware of the problem.
Down on the beach, when you go for your walk, you come across several little places where you can sit and sip a leisurely coffee. One of those places is the Beach Hut Cafe at Christchurch which an-nounced this year they are no longer using plastic packaging, after watching the Blue Planet series. They do a brisk trade, even in the winter on a sunny day. We locals like to get out the first chance the sun smiles from behind the clouds and so the Beach Hut uses a lot of cups, straws and bags. They now offer a discount on hot drinks if customers bring their own refillable cup and they have bins outside for cardboard, plastic and cans, which they recycle. " Anything we can do to help will be bet-ter than nothing and we hope to encourage other people to be more responsible too."
Across the water, another highly popular cafe called the Beach House has announced that they are stopping using plastic straws and coffee cup lids. I expect more cafes to do the same soon. We now have a new zero-waste shop area opening, encouraged by places like Bristol, Totnes and London. My personal hope is that this article inspires many people to become pro-active. How switched on is your community in addressing the global plastic problem?
Surfers Against Sewage- www. sas. org. uk
Great Dorset Beach Clean www. litterfreecoastandsea. co. uk
Surfers Against Sewage started back in the 1980s when a group of people who loved water sports including surfing, came together to protest at the sewage that was being pumped into the sea and making them sick. Nowadays plastic pollution has