An ocean full of plastic, not fish
This is the future if we do not change our throwaway culture, activist says
The tiny plastic straw in your drink will outlive you, your children’s children, and many generations combined. Worse, its particles can also turn up undigested in the fish your children’s children will eat not many years from now.
Plastic is made to last ‘forever’, yet much of it has been designed for single use, feeding our throw-away culture and eating up a huge chunk of our landfills.
Over the past 50 years, global plastics production has increased almost 2,000 times from 15 million tonnes in 1964 to 311 million tonnes in 2014. This is expected to double over the next two decades, according to a report by the Ellen Macarthur Foundation released in December 2017.
The report said around 26 per cent of the total volume of plastics is used in packaging, but only 14 per cent is recycled. Apart from landfills, eight million tonnes of this plastic waste leaks into the ocean — equivalent to a garbage truck full of trash being dumped into the ocean every minute.
If the world doesn’t act now, in 30 years, the oceans will have more plastic than fish by weight. The worst part is, these plastics are ingested by marine life and makes a comeback in many forms — through fish water system, rain and more.
“It’s in our food chain and this, I think, is the biggest alarm bell that we need to all become more conscious of. It’s not anymore about being an environmentalist. It’s not about an activist,” Tatiana Antonelli Abella, founder and managing director of social enterprise Goumbook, told Gulf News. “It’s just being responsible for the future generations and also for the ones who are living right now.”
UAE’s Drop It campaign
The most common on-thego plastic in the UAE are the plastic water bottles, roughly 450 of which are used by each resident per year.
Abella admitted she would use up 20 bottles of water per week and drove to Dubai Municipality to get those bottles recycled. This inspired her to launch the Drop It campaign.
“Years ago, people in the UAE thought the water from the tap was not good. I think the problem was born there. What is the alternative? Bottled water,” Abella said.
The water that the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority supplies is safe to drink. If there is a problem, it could be in the pipes or tanks in the building where the water is stored. Abella said this can be solved by just having tap water tested in a lab and the appropriate filter installed so residents can start drinking filtered water straight from the tap.
Also, ditching bottled water saves money.
“If tap water costs 0.02 fils a litre, why do I pay around Dh2 for 1-litre bottled water? What am I paying for? I’m paying for the plastics, for the logistics, for the branding, not for the water. It’s ridiculous.”
Refusing plastic bottled water and straws is just the first step. It can eventually become a lifestyle, she said.
“All the companies that have switched with us don’t go back. It’s [dropping single-use plastic] completely doable.”