Beat plastic pollution - UN World Environment Day

“If we continue business as usual, by 2050 there could be more plastics than fish in the ocean (by weight)” – The Ellen MacArthur Foundation

Delta-Simons is proud to be part of the campaign in eliminating single-use plastics from our day-to-day lives and work by helping our employees understand ways to reduce and refuse single-use plastics in their daily routine. World Environment Day is an opportunity to rethink how we use, reuse and dispose of plastic and therefore we are going to create a pledge as an organisation to #PledgeLessPlastic.

The United Nations hosts an international day each year dedicated to improving our environment. In 2018, the theme is “Beat Plastic Pollution – If you can’t reuse it, refuse it” and they are encouraging society to ‘break up with plastic’.

Did you know?

• Every year, the world uses 500 billion plastic bags.
• 17 million barrels of oil are needed to produce plastic bottles.
• We buy one million plastic bottles every minute.  
• Plastic makes up 10% of all the waste that we generate and 50% of the plastic we use is single-use.
• It costs nearly £1 billion a year for the UK tax payer to fund the cleaning up of litter including disposable plastics.
• The problem with plastic waste is that it doesn’t biodegrade and go away so it will remain in our ecosystems for years and years. Producing plastic also has a huge carbon footprint, and there are human health concerns around the degradation of the material leaching toxic chemicals into food and drink.

Following David Attenborough’s Blue Planet series at the end of 2017, there has been increasing momentum to beat plastic pollution. Examples include Buckingham Palace and the BBC banning single-use plastics and PG tips going plastic-free. In recent months, the UK has launched a ban on microbeads and it has been agreed that by 2021, retailers, businesses and local authorities will offer free refill stations for topping up water bottles. 

Organisations are crucial to driving this change, but individuals can also make pledges in their personal lives to reduce the amount of single-use plastic they use. A good place to start is looking at how you use “The Big Four”; plastic bags, plastic bottles, coffee cups, lids and straws. The website www.LessPlastic.co.uk has tips and advice on how to go about starting out on reducing the use of plastic.

A hot topic recently has been how plastic waste affects our oceans and the species that live in the oceans. This week also hosts World Ocean day on 8^th June so there isn’t a more important time to be considering our use of plastics and reducing plastic waste!