Friday blog series 3: Be Clean – Go Green
How to be plastic free!
Plastic pollution threatens food safety and quality, human health, coastal tourism, and contributes to climate change. Circa 12 million tonnes of plastic are poured into the ocean every year and If this continues, by 2050 every seabird species will be eating plastic!
There are many ways you can reduce your plastic use:
Continue to buy reusable shopping bags – since the UK’s plastic bag charge was introduced in 2015, it has achieved an 83% reduction in plastic bag use!
Avoid single-use plastics – for example buy re-usable straws rather than using plastic ones. You could also buy re-usable water bottles/hot drink cups. Each day the UK generates 15 million single-use plastic water bottles – it would take each of these bottles 450 years to decompose!
Swap your plastic toothbrush for a bamboo one! In the UK alone 264 million toothbrushes are thrown away every year – these can take up to more than 500 years to decompose!
Swap shampoo/soap bottles to bars OR refillable bottles – the average British household uses 216 haircare bottles a year!
Over the past 50 years, world plastic production has doubled, if consumption continues to increase at its current rate, by 2050 there will be 12 billion metric tonnes of plastic landfill – it is important to we to ACT NOW to begin to reduce our plastic consumption to save our planet.