Lumley: Join me to tackle scourge of plastic waste
WE ALL have to start taking responsibility for single-use plastic – manufacturers, retailers and consumers. We’ve got to stop passing the buck.
This throwaway practice is absolutely despicable.
I loathe throwing anything away if you don’t know that it’s going to be properly disposed of and we, as the consumer, must cut down whenever we can.
I think the Government should be doing more, too.
Plastic should be much more expensive and redeemable so people think twice about using it.
There should be a swingeing tax on plastic bottles that people can return and get the money back.
If you have a £1 deposit on every piece of plastic, people would bring bottles back so they can be reused or recycled.
It breaks my heart to see families in the supermarket with a trolley full of plastic bottled JOANNA Lumley joined the war on single-use plastics yesterday by calling on the nation to ditch bottled water and use filtered tap water instead.
The 73-year-old actress launched the ‘Just Tap. Filtered’ campaign to encourage people to cut down on plastic waste and save money by investing in reusable water filter jugs.
“I’m really interested in stopping the use of plastic single-use bottles,” the Ab Fab star said.
“It depresses me more than I can say because I see the seas full of them, I see the streets full of them, people leave them behind after picnics and it never biodegrades – yet this country has the best, cleanest tap water and it tastes absolutely delicious when you filter it.”
Research has revealed that 80 per cent of Britons want new laws to be introduced to tackle the plastic pollution crisis.
Almost half would also like to see single-use plastic water bottles banned entirely.
More than 7.7 billion bottles of water are sold every year in the UK, yet a quarter of Britons say they have no plans to reduce how much single-use plastic they buy, a study by water filter company BRITA and YouGov found.
Despite public awareness of the plastic pollution problem, threequarters of UK adults still regularly buy bottled water, despite half knowing that most of it will end up in landfill.
A tenth of people said they did not care enough about the environment to change their shopping habits, while a fifth of the population have never even tried filtered tap water. However, soaring numbers of Britons are ditching plastic milk cartons for glass bottles, with tens of thousands of people signing up to a reusable scheme in a single month.
More than 20,000 people made the switch after watching BBC One’s War on Plastic series, which aired in June.
Doorstep delivery service Milk & More yesterday revealed 75,000 people have signed up to its reusable scheme in a year.
It is estimated there are more than 150 million tons of plastic in the world’s oceans. Each year, one million birds and about 100,000 sea mammals die from eating or getting tangled in plastic waste.