What three items would you take to a desert island? The answers are practically infinite. However, they all share a common trait: one of these three objects, or perhaps even all three, will be made of plastic.
Since their invention and globalised spread at the turn of the last century, plastics have been slowly invading us.
They are very cheap to produce and very easy to reject. Our society is now so dependent on plastics that around 400 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated every year and, according to estimates by the United Nations (UN), this will reach 500 million tonnes by 2020. However, only 9% of this waste is recycled and put back into circulation.
The recycling problem
“We don’t recycle well,” warns Alejandro Piñol, waste prevention technician for the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB). “What can be recovered is little and of poor quality. We have to recycle at source, in our homes”. The aim is to reduce the consumption of plastics.
The “Better than new” campaign, for which Piñol is one of the leaders, seeks to raise public awareness, but in a more practical way. “It is about offering some tools to go back to the origins, to live as our grandparents did and to acquire healthy consumption habits: to buy in bulk, to reuse objects or even to repair when necessary. We have to cut the problem at the beginning of the chain, avoiding generating it,” he adds. And he is right, because plastic waste management is perhaps one of the biggest environmental problems that society in the 21st century will have to face.
Here’s an example. It takes an average of 450 to 600 years for a plastic bottle to degrade completely. And around 20,000 of them are produced in the world every second. Only a small percentage of these bottles will be recycled and subsequently incinerated.
All things being equal, the containers of our favourite soft drinks will outlive us by several generations. They will end up, at best, next to a gigantic mountain of waste in a controlled landfill, most likely managed by our great-grandchildren.
A threat to marine species
Much of this waste ends up in the middle of nature, which is an even bigger problem. “Most of the rubbish we find in the oceans basically comes from land,” says Blanca Bassas, a biologist at the Foundation for the Conservation and Recovery of Marine Animals (CRAM). Turtles, dolphins and whales often mistake plastics for haste and either eat them or end up entangled in them. When this happens, their lives are numbered.
“More than half of the animals that come to the centre do so because of incidents involving plastic waste. We usually recover turtles with bags in their stomachs and even some that have swallowed ear sticks or plastic straws and have become stuck in their oesophagus,” laments Blanca Bassas. But it doesn’t end there, because once in the water, plastics begin to degrade, forming a soup of microplastics. The consequences are still unpredictable.
Experts say that there are five islands of plastics in our seas, growing daily, out of control. “We don’t know their real effect on human health, although it is very likely that many of them are toxic for us,” Bassas warns. What is clear,” she says, “is that once fish ingest them, they enter the food chain,” where they accumulate in muscle tissue and organs.
Moreover, for the biologist, the consequences of so much plastic in the oceans not only have to do with pollution, but can also pose a serious problem for the planet’s diversity. “Many invasive species use marine plastics as a means of transport. Species have been found clinging to a bottle floating in the ocean and have reached areas where a few years ago it would have been unthinkable to find them,” she says with alarm, imagining the danger this poses to the most fragile ecosystems.
Hope in environmental education
Environmental education is an essential tool for tackling the problem. That is why many schools are already trying to educate future citizens committed to their environment. “Habits that are learned as children, such as tending to produce as little waste as possible, last into adulthood,” says Paulina Pérez, coordinator of a network of Sustainable Schools, a project that seeks to increase sustainability in schools in order to have a positive impact on the entire educational community.
The schools in the network aim to minimise the impact of academic life on the environment. For Pérez, it is encouraging to see how “it is young people who take a stand and try to change what surrounds them and will affect them in the future, influencing their families as well”. “But we can’t leave them alone,” he adds, “we need consumers and government to work together to find solutions.
In the meantime, some unsung heroes have decided to start turning the wheel on their own. “It’s not about a few people doing things perfectly, but about many people doing things, even if they are imperfect. This is the spirit in which Pure Clean Earth was born, a non-profit project, born in Barcelona and with numerous replicas all over the world.
Almost every weekend, Pure Clean Earth organises clean-ups of beaches and public places through social networks, always with a twofold mission: to clean up after others and to raise awareness.
Andrea Torres, co-founder of the initiative is very clear about this. “You can live without plastic, you just have to be aware and change habits slowly”. She admits that it is not an easy task: “it is not easy to reach Zero Waste, because plastic is all around us, but we can drastically reduce the waste we generate”. For Torres, “it’s not about saving the world, but about helping to change where it’s going. We just have to look for alternatives.
Alternatives to plastic
With this objective in mind, a little over a year ago ‘Yes future’ was created, the first plastic-free supermarket in Barcelona, a pioneering initiative that has broken with the traditional concept of the supermarket. Olga Rodríguez, owner of the store, agrees with Torres on the difficulty of getting rid of this material 100%: “it is possible to live without plastic, but to do so we have to make things easy for consumers”. For this reason, in his shop, customers buy with their own reusable containers.
The initiative has been followed by other shops in the vicinity, which are expanding their range of packaging-free products. Even so, there is still a long way to go. “Consumers and suppliers often have to give up certain products or brands to avoid generating unnecessary plastic waste”.
Be that as it may, the truth is that change has already begun and there are more and more alternatives to plastic, more research into new materials, more circular economy proposals, where plastic waste becomes a resource and not just useless waste, and more initiatives that invite us to get closer to zero waste.
It seems that we are close to disaster, but there is still room for hope. Now we just have to know if the day we have to travel to this desert island we will have to write a desperate distress message, or one in which we tell our potential rescuers to take it easy, that it is not so bad there. Of course, among these three personal items we will have to include only paper and pencil, because the bottle in which we send the message has long since reached its destination. And it will still be there for many years to come, waiting for us.
Another future is possible
“The future is this way”, says a sign at the entrance. Who could have told Olga Rodríguez and Alejandro Martínez that living in a third floor flat without a lift would be the key that would open the door to the future. “We were tired of going up and down the stairs to throw out the rubbish and we thought there would be a lot of people like us,” jokes Rodríguez. That was the spark that started the project to create the first plastic-free supermarket in Barcelona.
“Yes future” invites us to think about an alternative future, in which bamboo toothbrushes, vegetable scouring pads and metal straws will be the daily reality for hundreds of people who consider a more environmentally friendly existence.
“In this supermarket we buy in bulk and customers bring their own packaging,” says the co-owner, so no one is forced to consume a minimum amount of product. “We are facilitators. We try to make things easier for people,” she adds. “You take the one you want, you pay and you go. If you forget the container at home, you can buy a reusable one, but always as a last resort.
This is an establishment where customers can get all the products they need for everyday use: pulses, pasta, biscuits, dried fruit and nuts, cereals, spices. All in glass jars, ready for self-service. No bags and, if there are any, they are made of paper.
“All the products we offer are ecological and in line with our philosophy, otherwise we wouldn’t carry them”, assures Rodríguez. In this way, customers, of whom there are more and more, can be sure that what they consume has been sustainably managed throughout the process.
“Yes future” has become a plastic-free redoubt in the heart of Barcelona, a pioneering idea that strives to show society that another future, one without plastic, is possible.
Everything will come. Slowly. For the moment they have already shown us the way.
