Roadsides, river banks and beaches strewn with plastic waste have become a graphic illustration of just how much plastic we use in everything from food packaging to cosmetics, and how much of it gets thrown away.
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So we all know it is a problem. But it is also difficult to avoid.
Some manufacturers are now looking at ways of doing things differently.
One shampoo manufacturer has become the latest company to attempt to show it is tackling the problem, announcing plans for a limited run of their shampoo brand in bottles made partly from plastic waste collected by volunteers on France’s beaches.
Some other initiatives include a company that produces cleaning products, producing several limited edition bottles, using marine plastics from the North Sea and waste collected from Amsterdam’s canals. And the list goes on.
But let’s be clear, these initiatives, worthy though they are, still represent less than 0.6 per cent of the 29 million bottles of the shampoo I mentioned earlier. Nonetheless, it is still a technology breakthrough that has the potential to make higher recycled content in plastic packaging more viable.
In the past when companies have tried to use plastics that have been sourced from oceans or beaches, it hasn’t been technically possible because of the exposure to UV, and also the plastics degrade and don’t recycle that well. What they’ve done is make it technically viable.
While millions of tonnes of plastic go to landfill every year, a large chunk also ends up in the oceans. Research suggests there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. Plastics production is expected to double in the next 20 years, but just 14 per cent of plastic packaging is currently recycled globally - a figure that could be raised to 70 per cent with a concerted effort from industry.
Recycling may be a first step but if companies want to show real leadership they should shift to more circular economy business models. That means zero waste. Innovations in product design are to be welcomed, but they mean little if the company is contributing to a trend of generating more waste overall.
In an ideal world, we should be preventing waste plastic from going into the water in the first place, keeping waste plastic in use for as long as possible and recycling it.