Wild at Home:
In the wake of Blue Planet II, the BBC steps up its message to save our seas.
natural history TV, books, puzzles and more
We knew about the plastic problem long before Blue Planet II, but it wasn’t until the series aired six months ago that there has been an impetus collectively to do something about it. Across the land people are finally starting to ditch their guilty plastic pleasures, making beeswax wraps, ditching the straws and swapping single-use for sustainable.
To keep momentum afloat, the BBC has launched a new initiative called Plastics Watch. The clue’s in the title, but this is essentially a hub of content on the box and online to help you learn everything you didn’t already know about plastic: how it circumnavigates the globe; why it can’t all be recycled; how you can reduce your own use of the stuff; and what alternatives we might expect in the future.
There are facts and figures a-plenty to grapple with (in 2016, a million plastic bottles were sold globally every single minute; eight million tonnes of plastic ends up in the oceans every year) and various short films taking you, for instance, into the centre of a plastics processing plant (“plastics are a resource, not rubbish”); out to the Tasman Sea with biologist Liz Bonnin, who is investigating the consequences of plastic ingestion on shearwater chicks; and to the Panamanian island of Bocas del Toro to meet the man who has used 40,000 discarded bottles to build a castle.
“The actions of just one of us may seem trivial,” says David Attenborough, who launched Plastics Watch with a thank you message to the nation, “but the knowledge that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing the same thing – that really does have an effect.”