Plastic planet
News has just come through, as I write, that the EU (whether or not Britain will still be an interested party!) is to ban ‘single-use’ plastics from 2021. Let us just hope that this will not be a case of ‘too little, too late.’
Those of you who have Spanish TV will have seen my friend Sergio Arroyo, president of AHSA, deploring the awful mass of plastic accumulated at the mouth of the Rio Segura near Guardamar. And AHSA is more than a little active in organizing clean-up parties to shed our beaches of the awful stuff, which is now contaminating all our oceans to a very worrying degree, even to the extent of infiltrating our own food in the bodies of fish. And still the shops and markets blithely dish out plastic bags with every purchase. Unless YOU refuse them. I do!
Then there is the matter of waste disposal. Wherever you go, you will see it, scattered everywhere, or even causing huge fires. Enough! Another, and possibly worse, effect we are having upon the planet, is global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests, etc. Just one effect is the continued desertification of areas such as our own, where lack of rainfall is now making itself felt in a very big way. The need to irrigate such crops as can be grown is such that precious water supplies are in even more demand, and the pressures of over-population of coastal areas are unhelpful.
I apologise to readers if this week’s offering is a gloomy one, but awareness of the issues is essential, if we are to get to grips with them, and leave a decent planet for our grandkids.