Plastics, Pardo and pollution prevention
It was on 1 November 1967 that Maltese diplomat Arvid Pardo delivered his historic speech to the United Nations General Assembly urging the nations of the world to draw up new regulations ensuring peace at sea, preventing further pollution and protecting ocean resources.
His proposal that the seabed constitutes the common heritage of mankind was later enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, of which he is known as the ‘father’. This week, just a few weeks shy of being 50 years down the road, Malta hosted the ‘Our Oceans’ conference that brought together many of the world’s greatest environmental and scientific minds in what has now become an annual bid to determine how to best protect the world’s marine life and our oceans, which are falling increasingly under threat from pollution with each passing year. As a country we have come a long, long way since the days when we used to pump out raw, untreated sewage into our surrounding seas. Back in 2003 Malta was pouring 25.8 million cubic metres of untreated raw sewage into the sea every year. But by 2006 Malta had made significant progress and a European Commission
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report for that year had stated that 96 per cent of Malta’s designated bathing sites were free from marine pollution and complied with EU standards, a far cry from previous assessments. Today that figure stands at over 99 per cent. The reason? Malta had built three sewage treatment plants, with the help of European Union funds, and as a result no raw sewage is any longer being dumped at sea. The notable decrease in rashes and infections in swimming seasons and the clearer and colder seas around the islands are the best qualifications of what has been a significant improvement in not only in the quality of our bathing water but in our quality of life.
Thanks to these sewage treatment plants, Malta and its waters have come a long way over the last decade and a half, and the country will continue to reap the benefits over the next decades in terms of the tourism rewards and the even more tangible rewards in the improvement in the quality of all of our lives that comes with treating the county’s tens of millions of cubic metres sewage it produces every year.
Yes, as a nation we have cleaned up this aspect of our act but as a people we are failing quite miserably when it comes to plastics disposal. Plastic pollution is literally ubiquitous. If it is not in the sea itself, it is on the land waiting to be blown into the sea.
This of course is not exclusively a Maltese or Mediterranean problem, the scourge of plastic is such that scientists estimate that humans now intake particles of plastic with every bite of seafood that we consume.
The Prime Minister, recently commemorating the current government’s first 100 days in office, signalled the government is ready to seriously look into a deposit return system for plastics. Such a system, which of course merits further investigation, holds the potential to not only clean up the land but to also do this small country’s small part to minimise plastic pollution of our oceans and seas. Paying homage to Pardo at yesterday’s conference, the Prime Minister reconfirmed that “Malta is at the forefront in ensuring that our oceans remain the preserve of our shared future.” In his later years Pardo lamented how the ‘common heritage of mankind’ of which he had spoken so convincingly had been whittled down to “a few fish and a little seaweed” by diplomats. Let us hope that efforts being undertaken today to rid our waters of the scourge of plastic amount to much, much more than that.