Obsessing about the paralysing plague of plastic pollution

Monday, 5 August 2019

Recycling and litter bins in Victoria Square in Christchurch. However Mike Yardley says he regularly picks up litter walking around his neighbourhood.

OPINION: I have a special loathing for litter and the tossers who dump their trash with reckless abandon. They are slobs and reprobates.

Clean, litter-free streets speak volumes for the sense of pride in a place, civic pride and basic decency.

My abiding loathing for publicly-discarded litter impels me to pick up rubbish as part of my neighbourhood walking routine. The Swedish call it plogging.

The Christchurch streetscape is certainly defaced by more litter than it was a decade ago – and it staggers me how often I'll spot plastic detritus floating in the Heathcote River bound for the Pacific Ocean.

* Environmental group rubbishes stats used by Government to estimate impact of plastic bags

The tourist areas of cities like Cartagena, Colombia, were litter-free on his current trip, Mike Yardley says, but elsewhere the level of littering was confronting

* Quit these disposable plastic items today**

Yes, we may not be as bad as Bali, Vietnam or Thailand, where you don't have to look hard to find a shoreline awash in a stew of plastic rubbish, but we're certainly not in the same gold-star league of Singapore or Japan.

Plastic waste has been top of mind during my latest burst of occupational gallivanting which has taken me through Colombia, Mexico and California. In Bogota, Cartagena and Mexico City, the tourist haunts were impressively litter-free, yet venture into the outskirts or beyond the city limits and the horror show was confronting. Middens of discarded plastic waste, whether it be bags, packaging or wrappers, monstered the roadside, languished in waterways and even surrounded houses.

A local in Cartagena suggested to me that many residents had grown up in an age where they'd pluck a banana off a tree and just drop the skin, instinctively applying the same throwaway mentality to plastic wrapping, without appreciating the non-biodegradable consequences.

Perhaps Plastic Free July has inadvertently raised my consciousness about the perniciousness of single-use plastic pollution, but I've admittedly become quite obsessive about it on this trip.

Some hotels stuffed their guestrooms with single-use plastic amenities, like those silly shampoo, conditioner and shower gel bottles, while others had thoughtfully ditched such wasteful fripperies in favour of refillable dispensers, fixed to the wall.

Boarding a plane is another surefire encounter with a parade of chuck-away plastic. My flight from Bogota to Mexico City was a case in point where the plastic binge bordered on the farcical. I was swimming in it. My blanket was wrapped in plastic, the headset was bagged in plastic, as was my cheese sandwich, the bread roll, the packet of M&Ms, not to mention the plastic coffee cups and water cups, cutlery, toothpicks and stir sticks. Sin of all sins, even the paper napkin was swaddled in plastic. Go the green guilt spiral!

According to the International Air Transport Association, airline passengers alone generated over 6 million tons of plastic waste globally in 2017. And only 9 per cent of it is recycled.

Just where this waste finally ends up obviously depends on the destination it is off-loaded in, but whether it's dumped in landfills or drifts as litter above ground, you can bet your bottom dollar some of it ends up in the final sink, the ocean, infiltrating the loneliest reaches of the planet, the stomachs of deep-sea creatures, and ultimately the human gut.

It's actually why I believe waste-to-energy incineration plants are part of the solution to eliminate plastic pollution. In the past year, many airlines have started ringing in the changes, including Air New Zealand.

From October, coffee cups made from plants rather than plastic will be rolled out across its domestic and international networks, while plastic water cups will be transitioned to recyclable alternatives from September.

On an annual basis, the airline currently chews through 44 million plastic cups. Individual plastic water bottles have been withdrawn from all flights, under five hours in duration.

I'm writing to you from San Francisco, a city that has gone full-tilt in the war against single-use plastic products – although wouldn't it be nice if they aggressively unleashed the same resolve against the homelessness crisis that soils the city

All manner of single-use plastic food and beverage accessories, from chopsticks to coffee cup lids, are in the gun here. And hot off the press, San Francisco Airport will ban the sale of plastic water bottles later this month. Fair enough. I too want a future where there is more fish life than plastic swimming in our oceans.