“Plastic can never be recycled completely. After two or three recycles it becomes inferior in quality. A staggering 72% of plastic packaging is not recovered at all: 40% is landfilled, and 32% leaks out the collection system,” says Watson.
In our oceans, plastic breaks down into molecules, which behave like sponges and sop up other toxins – colourants, additives, plasticisers – which get into our food chain and poison us. It’s simple, if you put toxins in they have to come out somewhere. All the plastic ever made is still here, in one form or another. [...]
The worse culprits are single-use plastic and plastic packaging: coffee cups (10,000 chucked every two minutes, just in the UK), straws (Americans use 500m every day), yoghurt cartons, cocktail stirrers, plastic razors, microbeads, and Tetra Pak cartons (because they’re made of several ingredients that are difficult to separate: card, aluminium, plastic coating) and coffee pods. [...]
On a national scale, France has passed a new law which will come into effect in 2020 to ensure all plastic cups, cutlery and plates can be composted and are made of biologically-sourced materials. Germany has the Original Unverpackt zero-waste supermarket and Hamburg has gone as far as banning coffee pods (often a mix of aluminium and plastic) from state-run buildings.
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