Change can happen quickly – if we make it happen!

Tweet

Plastic waste and litter has been a problem as long as I can remember, and although ‘Knowledge is power’ in this case knowing about the problem doesn’t seem to have helped, in fact it has been getting steadily worse for decades. Now though it seems that the BBC’s latest series of ‘Blue Planet’ presented by David Attenborough and shown on UK TV has brought the issue of plastic litter, especially in the marine environment, more into the public consciousness. It has demonstrated clearly that when something is thrown away, there is really no such place as ‘away’ and it just turns up somewhere else, causing harm in all sorts of unforeseen ways. After this there has been far more attention on the subject, and numerous articles in/on various media on the subject of single-use plastic in particular. Plastic straws hit the headlines as a typical example of something plastic that is thrown away almost immediately and is totally unnecessary in the first place. No sooner had I heard an article about this on the radio, than I went to the supermarket and, lo and behold, they had paper straws for sale! I had never seen them there before, and I couldn’t believe how quickly they had (presumably) responded to the public backlash against single-use plastic straws. I don’t know if these are truly recyclable (it says they are, but not sure if I believe it) but in our house they are going in the compost bin. That just seemed to illustrate how incredibly quickly things can change in response to public pressure. People often say ‘What can I do? It’s such a huge problem’ but it grew up one little thing at a time, and I think that just shows that we can improve the situation one little change at a time too, if we only want to enough! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2018.