Charles backs Mail’s plastic bottle campaign
Prince warns: Every piece of sea-caught fish that you eat contains plastic
PRINCE Charles warned yesterday that ‘plastic is now on the menu’ as almost every fish caught for the dinner table contains refuse dumped in our oceans.
He attacked the damaging effects of the ‘throwaway, convenience lifestyles of many around the world’, which sees eight million tonnes of plastic waste entering seas and oceans each year.
He also criticised ‘perverse’ global fisheries subsidies, which encourage excessive and unregulated fishing, further depleting stocks. Calling for urgent action, Charles said: ‘All the plastic that we have produced since the 1950s that has ended up in the ocean is still with us in one form or another, so that wherever you swim there are particles of plastic near you and we are very close to reaching the point when whatever wildcaught fish you eat will contain plastic. Plastic is indeed now on the menu!’
Charles was speaking at the Our Ocean Conference in Malta, where he helped to release a loggerhead turtle back into the sea after it had been treated after swallowing a piece of plastic. He used his speech to launch a Blue Economy Initiative, a collaboration between the Prince’s International Sustainability Unit (ISU) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), which aims to encourage investment and policies that protect the oceans.
Charles said it was time for ‘bold action’, adding: ‘I’m afraid I really do wonder if the ocean’s fragility is yet truly grasped and how susceptible it is to the impacts of our economic activities?
‘We must act now. How, otherwise, will future generations ever forgive us for destroying the viability of the natural world that is our ultimate sustainer?’
Charles said the extent of the problem was ‘enormous, systemic and interrelated’, but he was optimistic that attempts made to stem the flow of plastics into the seas over the past decade would continue and increase.
He said: ‘With some brave decisions, the ocean can recover its health and by doing so generate employment and economic growth. Will there, at last, be a realisation that this small, beautiful blue dot of a planet may have been misnamed? It is not earth, it is actually mostly sea and we are utterly reliant upon it.’
Charles also highlighted the need to take ‘ equally farsighted steps’ to deal with ‘over exploitative fishing’.
He said: ‘Surely the time is long overdue for taking a thorough, global look at perverse fisheries subsidies
‘The ocean can recover its health’
and their effects – particularly where they appear to contribute to overfishing, overcapacity and to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing?
‘Can it be right to argue on the one hand that our ocean must be protected while, on the other, activities that cause harm to the ocean should be subsidised?’
The heir to the throne said he
believed it was ‘utterly crucial’ to create what he described as a ‘circular’ economy, which allows plastics to be recovered, recycled and reused instead of created, used and then thrown away.
‘On our increasingly crowded planet this economic approach has to be a critical part of establishing a more harmonious relationship between humankind and the ocean that sustains us all.’ Charles also argued that pirates terrorising vessels off the coast of Somalia had had an unforeseen positive effect – creating a fisherman-free zone where marine life had thrived.
He told Sky News: ‘There hasn’t been any fishing there for the last ten or 15 years and from that there has been a fantastic explosion of bigger and bigger fish, all along the coast. What you need to do is organise the fishing in a way that enables the fish, and everything the fish depend on, to survive in their eco-systems.’
He added: ‘Fish are eating what they think are plankton and in fact it turns out to be plastic so it all comes back into the food chain.’ He said many ‘marvellous’ manufacturers were trying to develop alternatives to plastic, but added: ‘People go to the supermarket and complain bitterly there isn’t a piece of plastic between each slice of smoked salmon or whatever it is. The difficulty is what do you have instead of that?
‘There are alternatives beginning but they are apparently not yet good enough.’