60 UN countries now tackling scourge

THE world is waking up to the harm that plastic pollution does, with 60 out of 193 United Nations countries now taking action to curb it, a UN report said yesterday.

But the head of the UN’s Oceans Programme, Dr Lisa Emelia Svensson, warned: ‘The scale is massive and we see [the equivalent of] one garbage truck [of plastic] a minute is just poured into the ocean.

‘The plastic that we consume ends up, more or less, or sooner or later, in our oceans and seas and lakes.’ She told the BBC’s Today programme: ‘It never goes away, it breaks down in small pieces and those small pieces, the microplastics, end up in our food chain, in the ecosystem that lives in the ocean.’

The UN report detailing the action being taken against plastic pollution said: ‘Governments around the world are increasingly awake to the scale of the crisis.’

But it warned that plastic production is set to ‘skyrocket’, with terrible consequences. ‘Only a tiny fraction [of plastic waste] is recycled,’ it said.