Oceans pollution

Imagine you are on a beach, playing beach tennis with a friend on the water’s edge, and that in the middle of nowhere a truck full of garbage appears and throws everything nearby you.

This is what happens, according the the report “The New Plastics Economics”, every day 365 days a year. At least 8 million tons of garbage ends up in the sea every year and forecasts are even more terrifying, if there will be no route change in the near future. If we continue with this pace in 2050 the trucks will be as much as 4 everyday, and the plastic bottles in the sea could will be more numerous than the fishes.

In the Pacific ocean there is even a plastic island, formed by an enormous stockpile of floating trash. The dimensions are hard to define (it depends on the criteria that you use to measure it) but they vary between 700.000 squared kilometers (an area as big as the Iberian peninsula) and 10 million squared kilometers (an area as big as the USA).

Also the Mediterranean sea is very polluted even if not by waste of big dimension but by the so called “microplastic”. The Environmental Agency of the United Nations has estimated that every day 731 tons of plastic end up in the Mediterranean Sea, 92% of which is made by microplastic. This kind of pollution is even worse of the one generated by the waste of big dimension because the particles that create microplastic are ingested by animals that we will then eat, with negative effects for our organism.

What can we do to change the situation? The demand for plastic in Europe in 2015 (last available data) was 50 million tons of which the 70% has been registered by only 6 countries, among them Italy. Our country is in the top three for the consumption pro capita of plastic bottled mineral water (178 litre per capita, third country in the world after Mexico and Thailand). Around the 40% of the production of plastic become packaging, which means it has a temporary usage. This plastic is used momentarily before using the real product, before eating food or wearing new clothes. Then, we only recycle a part of the enormous amount of plastic we produce, and around a third of the total is abandoned in the environment and, often, will end up polluting our oceans.

What should we do? Can we make our contribution by changing the something in our daily life? Yes, we can. The roads that lead us to this change pass through the reduction of the consumption of plastic and the correct disposal of the plastic we use. For this reason we ask you, when you make buy something, to prefer products which are without packaging or with less packaging. Another unbiased suggestion is avoiding plastic bottled water. Use tap water or, if it is not drinkable, install in your home a system that can make it drinkable. Do not leave plastic objects in the street, in the mountain, near waterways and use only dumpsters dedicated to plastic. These little and ordinary precautions, that everybody knows, are anyway crucial for the survival of our seas.

Our contribution, even if crucial, can also be not enough. We need global policy for the reduction of the production of plastic and for the improvement of its disposal.

Some cities, like Amburg (one of the biggest German cities), has already forbidden the usage in public places of the odious plastic bottles. We dream that in Italy our policy makers will do the same, starting from schools. The young generations should not even know the meaning of the world “plastic bottle”.

Also about the disposal Italy can and should do more. We join the request of Legambiente (environmental association in Italy) which pleaded that plastic should not “die” inside landfills, but should be recycled or used to produce energy.

From our side, we try to give our contribution. Even if it is possible (other companies do it) we have always refused to produce a ready to use version of Bivo in a plastic bottle. This version could be more convenient for somebody but we prefer the “discomfort” of washing the shaker to the islands full of plastic in our oceans.

 

Data from the article are taken from:

“The New Plastic Economy – Rethinking the future of plastics”; Ellen Macarthur Foundation; 2016.

“The Mediterranean Plastic Soup: synthetic polymers in Mediterranean surface waters”; G. Suaria, C. Avio, A. Mineo, G. Lattin, M. Magaldi, G. Belmonte, C. Moore, F. Regoli, S. Alian; Nature.

To know more about the plastic island we invite you to read this brief article https://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/patch.html of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an american federal agency.