Plastic Beach

Day Seven of the Plastic Challenge.

So far, it's going well. I've begun to 'cheat' (!) less as I am running out of the things that I already had in the cupboard that were wrapped in plastic. I've lost weight too, not a motive for doing this challenge, but an obvious side effect I suppose when you consider that cutting out plastic pretty much alleviates any junk food from your diet. I am a total crisp fiend usually!

Thursday night I did a beach clean. One girl, just over one hour, a small patch of beach and a whole lot of plastic crap and other litter. I was surprised at the volume of stuff I found in this short amount of time. On the Friday night, I sorted it all. Here's a photo:

Apologies for the bad lighting; by the time I finished it was late and two episodes of Sherlock Holmes had passed by. Martin Freeman...*sigh*...oh, I digress!

So, what was this haul made up of?

The most numerous items were (number of pieces in brackets) 

 

Cigarette Butts (78)
Fragments of Foam / Polystyrene (30) - various sources
Lids (27) - mainly screw tops from drink bottles
Straws and straw wrappers (19)
Lollipop sticks (19)
Bits of rope (19)
Fishing line (10)

The quantity of line and rope is in keeping with the worldwide issue of abandoned or lost fishing equipment. These items are a huge contributing factor to marine debris and are responsible for the death of millions of marine animals due to entanglement. World Animal Protection state that 640,000 tonnes of this 'ghost gear' as it is called is left in the oceans each year. Their current Sea Change campaign is seeking to tackle this, along with many other organisations such as ghostfishing and the Global Ghost Gear Initiative. If you need some inspiration do something about ghost gear, watch this incredibly moving video of the rescue of a young humpback whale. Then go forth, oh compassionate people, and campaign against fishing methods that use huge nets like trawling and campaign for more regulation on the dumping of this gear out at sea!

Plastic straws are one of the top ten globally recorded items of marine litter. Over six million straws and drinks stirrers have been collected in beach cleans over the past 25 years (source: Be Straw Free). These are a completely unnecessary single use item that all of us can live without. Next time you get a drink in a bar, say no to straws and stirrers! If you really want to use them get reusable ones like this pretty stirrer (Yes, £22.00 may be a lot for a stirrer, but if you actually drink enough cocktails to warrant needing one in your life then I will assume you can afford to shell out for it) or this stainless steel straw.

The lids were mainly from water bottles. In my opinion, buying bottled water is completely ridiculous when you live in a country with highly monitored, sanitary drinking water (Yep, even with the flouride). I want to give bottled water its own post so I don't want to dwell on it too much here, but if you can't kick the bottled water habit, go for a glass bottled variety and recycle it.

The foam and polystyrene was mainly in little pieces and some were hard to identify. However, from the colour and shape of some pieces, it seemed that they were parts of balls; the kind people might play with with their dogs. Other pieces seemed likely to have come from polystyrene cups or packaging like fish and chip trays.

But the reigning champion of beach litter was the cigarette butt. Here they are, all 78 of them. Completely gross and stinking.

Smokers, answer me this: would you throw a crisp packet on the floor? Or a drinks can? If the answer is no, as it should be, why throw a cigarette butt on the floor? It is litter, and toxic litter at that, containing chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic. Upon entering the sea, these chemicals pass into the water, affecting marine life. They are also hazardous to land animals. Your one cigarette may not seem such a big deal, but there are millions of other people littering cigarette butts too. Cellulose acetate that they are made of takes 12 years to break down. They are disgusting. They belong in a bin! Put them out underfoot if you must, but then please pick them up. I love Surfers Against Sewage's brilliantly named No Butts on the Beach campaign, but also urge you not to leave your butt anywhere outdoors! (Tee hee) That goes for filters and cigarette packets too. An estimated 6,750 million cigarette butts are dropped on the streets of London each year; the money spent cleaning up after this habit could be put to so much better use!

I also found lots of these little plastic pieces:

And some balloon litter:

Please don't ever release balloons (or Chinese lanterns); what goes up must come down, and when they come down these items are litter. The organisation balloons blow has lots of information about this issue. The amount of balloon litter they have collected has to be seen to be believed. Wildlife can fall victim to balloons, mistaking them for food or getting tangled in the strings, which is often fatal ( as was the case for this Razorbill):

After starting a monthly donation to Amnesty International I found out they do balloon releases. Having talked to them about it, with no sign of them stopping I will be cancelling my support and choosing a human rights group that act more responsibly towards the environment.

So there you have it, the analysis of my beach clean. If you use any of these items hope you feel inspired to change your habits, moving away from the single use plastic mentioned in this blog post towards better, reusable alternatives where possible, avoiding altogether where alternatives do not exist.

The alternative to smoking is of course not smoking, but taking into account that giving up can be a very hard thing to do, and you may not want to give up, for the time being at least make sure your butts go in the bin! Thank you :)

Photo from Surfer Against Sewage

Plastic Free Month: Supermarket Shenanigans

In my last post I began telling you about my current mission: a month free from single use non recyclable plastic. Four days in I'm enjoying the challenge, although the same can't be said for the supermarket till workers who are having to deal with my unruly, unpackaged vegetable and fruit purchases.

I always buy fruit and veg loose; for most things, there seems to be the option of plastic wrapped or not, which only makes it more irritating because it shows that the packaging really isn't necessary. The only explanation is 'convenience', but people can, and would, cope with buying three loose, unwrapped leeks if they had to...I cope with it despite being 27 and unable tie my laces properly. Here are some photos of plastic packed multiple veg madness just for your consideration:

Madness

Lunacy

Insanity

By the way, when you start buying loose veg you'll notice that people only queue behind you until they realise you have a haul of individual, time consuming vegetables to be put through and then they dash off to another till. Tee hee hee! You annoying lil' eco warrior, you!

So, on this occasion in Waitrose (hey, it's not that I'm flush, they just seem to have pretty good ethics as far as supermarkets are concerned) I set about looking at the loose fruit. Many were packaging free, none of them were plastic free. Every single loose fruit had a sticker on it. No sale. So, I moved on to new potatoes. There were lots of different types but they were all in plastic. All, that is, except these little beauties on the bottom shelf:

Taters: boil 'em, mash 'em, put 'em in a stew perhaps?

Their cleaned, polished and packaged counterparts on the top shelf were accordingly well behaved. The loose potaters on the other hand, in all their dirt covered glory, were free to roll around the conveyor belt, leaving a trail of soil wherever they went. This was much to the annoyance of the lady at the till; "I'm going to have to wipe this off" she said, nodding towards the aforementioned dirt. "It'll ruin the conveyor belt". "I'm sorry, it's just that all the cleaned ones are in plastic, they should sell the clean ones loose" I explained. "Most people put these into the plastic bags" She retorted. "I'm trying to avoid it, single use bags are terrible" I replied (which reminds me, being apologetic about things like making a mess on a conveyor belt is the courteous thing to do, but don't apologise for your ethical stance when you're trying to make a difference!) She smiled and said she completely agreed, presented me with a Waitrose customer feedback card with a web address and asked me to go onto the site and make suggestions there. Well, you know what Mrs? I jolly well will!

I'm using things that I already had in the kitchen prior to this challenge that I wouldn't be able to buy during this challenge. Grains are one example of  foodstuffs I need to find alternative shops for; I only ever see them in plastic. It feels a bit like cheating using packaged goods I already had...I guess it is really?! Going completely plastic free is, it seems, practically impossible. I wonder how I'd get on next month after I've run out of my stock of plastic covered goods. However, just because you can't get away from it entirely, doesn't mean you shouldn't reduce where you can.

Today's plastic reducing tip can be done by everyone:

Replace your Toothbrush and Toothpaste with non plastic alternatives

In the UK, if everyone changes their toothbrush every three months (usual recommended lifespan) that equates to more than 260 million toothbrushes being thrown away each year. 

 

That is ridiculous when a plastic free alternative exists. Get yourself a toothbrush made from sustainable bamboo with natural bristles (non animal derived). It comes in a little cardboard box too, so everything in this product can be recycled or will biodegrade. I got mine from greenshop.co.uk for only £2.86. An eco friendly bargain.

Lush Cosmetics have mastered the alternative to plastic packaged toothpaste. Their Toothy Tabs are little tablets of toothpaste that you crunch up between your teeth. You then wet your toothbrush and brush your teeth as you would normally. There's a choice of flavours; if you'd like to retain the familiar minty freshness of your usual toothpaste, go for 'Dirty'. My personal favourite is 'Sparkle', with the tingly combination of grapefruit and black pepper. They come in a little recyclable cardboard box. Priced from £2.00 to £3.50 (depending upon which flavour/ingredients) these are available in Lush stores or online via their website.

Behold, the bamboo toothbrush!

So there you have it, make one little change and help make a big difference!

Tonight I went for a walk on the beach and did a beach clean for a couple of hours, then sat and ate my dinner from a Tupperware pot whilst being watched by this guy:

In my next post I'll be looking through all the things I picked up off the beach, which included a lot of the main culprits for unnecessary, non recyclable, single use plastic rubbish that litters the beaches and seas.

Any guesses for the main offenders?

Plastic Free Month Challenge

Some people fear zombies, A.I. or badgers taking over the world.
Well, be afraid, something already has taken over the world.

It's in your house.
It's in the shops you go into.
It's on your food.
It's in your food.
It's everywhere.

"WHAT KIND OF HELL IS THIS UNKNOWN FOE?!"
You may well ask...

PLASTIC.

Yes, you read it right; plastic. The more you think about plastic, and especially if you try to avoid it as I am doing this month, the more you will come to realise how obsessed our developed world is with it. It really has completely taken over our lives and, considering its lifespan (which is basically forever as it only into smaller pieces and never breaks down completely), it will effect the lives of every future generation too.

I've been proactive about making choices that reduce my contribution to plastic use for some time now but, as aforementioned, this month I am going to try and cut it out all together.

Now, I have a job which relies upon me using my car, phones, computers etc. so I cannot rid myself of plastic completely, but those aren't the non-recyclable and often single use items of plastic that are the problem I am seeking to address.


It's the completely unnecessary things for which plastic free more environmentally friendly options exist and / or the things most commonly found as litter that bother me most.

It costs £1 billion in the UK to deal with litter every year (Source: Keep Britain Tidy ) most of which is likely to be plastic. However, putting things in the bin isn't enough; we need to tackle this problem at its source.

I'll be sharing some information about how you and I can reduce the plastic in our lives and, in doing so, reduce the burden of waste plastic for the lives of future generations, the lives of wildlife and the well being of the whole planet.

Why not join in yourself? Share your ideas with me about reducing our dependency upon plastic!