Earlier on this week Greenpeace released a short film on the plastic crisis. Entitled "Wasteminster: A Downing Street Disaster" it was developed in collaboration with creative collective Studio Birthplace and produced by Park Village.
In the short film plastic waste, from bottles to packaging, piles up on Boris Johnson, who is delivering a speech outside Number 10 Downing Street (every line in the film is an actual quote from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove).
Soon he is submerged by an avalanche of plastic waste, a giant wave that sweeps him away. As the camera zooms out we realise that the giant wave is actually a huge scary mountain representing the quantity of plastic the UK dumps on other countries not every year, but every day - 1.8 million kilograms.
While the UK government has been claiming it is a world leader in tackling plastic pollution, Greenpeace is claiming that it is actually the second biggest producer of plastic waste per person in the world, behind the USA. A new Greenpeace investigation has also found more evidence of plastic waste from the UK being dumped in Turkey.
We may all try to carefully separate our waste, but do we ever wonder if our plastic actually gets recycled after it is collected? Probably we don't.
Plastic waste and packaging in the UK is supposed to be recycled but the truth is that the government is unable to cope with such huge quantities of plastic. Waste therefore ends up in incinerators that turn into a cause of pollution, or it gets sent to other countries, most of them with very low recycling rates. In the case of the UK plastic waste, Greenpeace identified two countries as the recipient of these waste products, Turkey and Malaysia. UK and EU norms state that plastic waste should not be exported to countries unless it is going to be recycled over there, but these countries do not have the recycling facilities needed.
Once the plastic waste gets to another country, it gets burnt in the open air or dumped. In this way plastic harms wildlife, polluting our oceans and turning into a health risk for the locals.
Turkey receives over a third (38%) of all of plastic waste exports from the UK: in 2020 only, the UK exported nearly 198,000 tonnes of polyethylene to Turkey.
Yet soon things may change: the country recently announced that it will ban most types of plastic waste imports (Turkey's trade minister removed some polymers from the waste products they would allow into the country, such as polyethylene plastic, present in over 90% of the UK plastic wastes exported so far to Turkey), after Greenpeace's investigation discovered that British waste - that included packaging from British supermarkets such as Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Marks & Spencer, just to mention a few of them, as highlighted in Greenpeace's report "Trashed" - was left to burn or was dumped on beaches and roadsides in the city of Adana.
Dumping waste in other countries is not a new habit: the same thing often happens with unwanted textiles and garments, when they can't be sold at second-hand charity shops, they get collected and shipped to Africa.
China banned imports of waste in 2017, and its ban pushed countries to look for other places where they could dump their trash.Turkey emerged as an alternative "market" for British plastic waste (that also gets shipped to Malaysia and Poland).
Greenpeace is asking for a ban on all plastic waste exports to countries that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, such as Malaysia, and on mixed plastic waste to OECD countries such as Turkey that detains the lowest recycling rate, 12%, the lowest of any OECD member.
Yet it's not only the UK that is exporting waste, there is indeed a boom in the illegal waste trade: just a couple of days ago the authorities seized a truck containing 13 tonnes of automotive waste directed to Albania and leaving from the harbour of Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. Customs found that the load was labelled as containing automotive parts, but in reality the shipment contained waste collected by a car demolition company based in the Marche region that was sued for illegal transboundary traffic of waste.
This behaviour proves we haven't learnt anything from Coronavirus, we may indeed get new and more frequent pandemics if we harm people living in other countries and if we keep on recklessly polluting the environment.
Recycling all the plastic we employ doesn't seem to be possible simply because we use too much plastic. A good starting point would therefore be to reduce the use of throwaway plastic containers and, to this aim, Greenpeace is asking for a 50% reduction in single-use plastic by 2025.
Mountains of plastic waste are not the only problem: exporting may be invisible to our eyes, but we can still see the damages caused to the environment via pictures like the ones taken by Greenpeace in Karahan Kuyumcular, a village in the District of Seyhan, and in Tuzla Lagoon, both in the Adana Province, Turkey. But there are other and more invisible yet equally dangerous enemies around like microplastics.
These tiny fragments of plastics smaller than 5mm get accidentally released into the environment during production breakdown of various plastic items, including grocery bags and water bottles, but they get also released when washing synthetic clothes.
As they are not biodegradable, microplastics disperse into wastewater and into the oceans, endangering marine life and entering into the food chain, so ultimately harming us. Apart from marine animals, microplastics were found on vegetable and fruit and in a variety of foods, from tea and salt to rice, milk, honey and sugar, and in both tap and bottled water.
In 2019 the Environmental and Food Hygiene Laboratories (LIAA) at the University of Catania patented a "Method for the extraction and determination of microplastics in samples with organic and inorganic matrices". This system allows the real quantification of microplastics of dimensions smaller than 10 microns up to the nano for almost all types of plastic and in all types of samples (environmental and biological) without the aid of filtration methods.
Filtration methods can indeed be imprecise as the microplastic particles can be smaller than the pores of the filter and they may therefore escape the process. This method may be used in the environmental, food and medical fields.
More recent studies are considering the possibility of removing polluting microplastics with a bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa. According to researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) the sticky bacteria property could be employed to create adhesive microbe nets that could trap microplastics in polluted water and form a recyclable mass.
Most methods to eliminate microplastics are not sustainable, but in this case the bacteria would form a natural biofilm. Yet the study is still at a preliminary stage (besides, the experiments carried out so far were done with the "aeruginosa" bacteria strain that carries diseases for humans and could therefore not be used on a large scale).
Microplastics are clearly making their way into our bodies (researches found microplastics in placentas and human poo) and scientists are very interested in learning more about the potential health effects from microplastics in food.Fashion indirectly produces a lot of microplastics since, as stated above, these particles are released when washing synthetic garments. A couple of years ago I started researching the possibilities of developing an infographic system for consumers that I called the "Microplastic Awareness Project".
The project, developed in collaboration with Italian graphic designer Nicola Salerno (who sadly passed away last June), revolved around generating awareness towards this issue via a series of labels aimed at consumers.
We developed together 4 types of labels, from a basic one that could warn consumers about the fact that a garment could release microplastics when washed, to a label that could remind them that microplastics are dangerous for the environment. The third and fourth labels suggest instead to consumers to use a washing machine filter or a special laundry bag when washing a particular garment (some companies such as Patagonia do sell special laundry bags to raise awareness about microplastics).
Applying a label to all the garments that may release microplastics may be expensive, but the idea could grow and transform: for example, a fashion brand may also try and team up in future with a company producing washing machines and collaborate with them to create a special filter to apply to machines to collect microplastics. Coronavirus has transformed us, our habits and some industries like fashion, but we must start acting to bring some genuine changes that can help protecting our planet to secure our future.
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