An inconvenient truth
MY excitement at visiting Pulau Ketam quickly turned from exhilaration to disbelief. Then I felt ashamed looking at the plastic bags clutched in my hands, filled with cheap seafood and dried cuttlefish.
All it had taken was a moment’s distraction. In a well-practised sleight of hand, the cashier had double-bagged in plastic my fresh seafood order, which were already encased in two protective layers of plastic. I briefly contemplated appealing for the liberation of my purchases but (to my shame) chose the path of least resistance. The deed was done, and the purveyors of plastic had been victorious on this occasion.
The scenic quaint heritage village located a mere 45 minutes from Port Klang offers a lot for visitors — cheap trinkets, fresh seafood and Chinese cuisine at reasonable prices. Beautiful wooden homes on stilts are the main feature and attraction for sightseers. Yet peering through the gaps between houses, and the beach surrounding this little fishing enclave tells a different story. Plastic bags, construction debris, bottles, discarded tyres and all sorts
of garbage are seen clogging drains and waterways.
But this isn’t simply a story of improper waste management that’s a perennial issue faced by this fishing village. Some 20 per cent of waste gets washed from the mainland to the island due to its close proximity — making it a catchment area for waste that floats in our ocean. What’s worse? Discarded plastic bags and plastic bottles seem to dominate the flotsam and jetsam that wind up on the island’s shores and into their drains and waterways.
It’s easy to wave a finger at the island’s residents and demand they do something about the reeking garbage that collects beneath their houses. The truth of the matter is this: Those plastic bags, those empty bottles? They could easily be ours. If what has winded up on the shores of islands such as Pulau Ketam is shocking, then what about the plastic discards that still float in our rivers and oceans?
Are you a consumer of plastic? If you are, then the problem of these things clogging our seas and waterways is ours collectively. With International Plastic Bag Free Day observed globally on July 3, perhaps it’s time we took a serious view on the impact we’re making on our environment.
It’s convenient to use a plastic bag. Walk into any grocery shop to buy your monthly provisions, and chances are you’d have walked out lugging a plastic bag filled with your purchases. It’s hygienic, light in weight and yet considerably strong.
Easily produced and accessible, it’s a common item used in almost every household across the globe.
It wasn’t always thus. In the late 1970s, single-use plastic bags were seldom available in grocery stores and shopping outlets. Since then, they’ve become an omnipresent part of the exchange of merchandise for money, a “free” offering to consecrate the ritual. An estimated one trillion bags are used each year globally, but they’re so seamlessly ingrained into our daily routines that we hardly notice. It’s difficult to imagine life without them.
The use of plastic bags has expanded due to its high versatility. Plastic bags are made from both natural gas and petroleum. The production of plastics account for only four per cent of the world oil consumption and yet an even less amount of this is used for the production of plastic bags. However, plastic production and disposal also generates around 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year globally, more than total annual emissions from Britain!
Imagine this:
A recent research by the Centre of International Environmental Law estimates that just the production and incineration of plastics will add 850 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere this year, which they calculate is equivalent to the emissions from 189 new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plants.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that some eight million tonnes of plastic waste end up in the oceans each year, while a 2016 World Economic Forum report projects that there’ll be more plastic than fish by weight in the oceans by 2050 ― if current trends continue.