I was at a Zoom meeting earlier today on household plastic rubbish.
It was presented by Daniel Webb, from Everyday Plastic, and organised by the St Albans Green Party.
When his local council would not provide a recycling service, Daniel decided to monitor his household rubbish. He recorded 4,490 individual items, 60% was food packaging – largely salad and vegetable wrappers and bread bags. Ninety-three per cent was single-use plastic, and just eight items – mostly coffee lids – were made out of biodegradable material. When scaled up to the whole of the UK population this amounts to a staggering 300 billion items per year
He points out that much of the rubbish placed in Recycle Bins will be exported and burnt.
So the challenge for me : is there anything I can do to reduce my plastic waste?
Looking around, I think I could make a start with yoghurt pots. Half of a typical soya yoghurt pot contributes about 15% of my daily protein requirement, so not too difficult to replace. Looks like I have a choice: find a source of yoghurt with non-plastic packaging, make my own, or replace it with another food source.
Plastic pollution is also a reason for not eating fish.
The Giant Pacific Garbage Patch is an eighty thousand tonne, million square kilometre accumulation of ocean plastic in the pacific. At least 46% of it consists of discarded fishing nets.
So not eating fish will indirectly avoid filling the oceans with more plastic. And there are plenty of nutritious plant-based replacements.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/17/i-kept-all-my-plastic-year-4490-items-forced-rethink
[2] https://www.everydayplastic.org
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
