Today is the day proclaimed by the United Nations as World’s Oceans Day. It is a day set aside, as with most of the international days of observances, to shed light on important issues affecting the world that are often overlooked. The theme for this year is “Healthy Oceans, Healthy Planet”, with emphasis being placed on reducing plastic pollution in our rivers and oceans.
Plastics can contribute to the reduction of our carbon footprint because of their stability and resistance to degradation. They provide improved insulation, lighter packaging, and are found in phones, computers, medical devices, etc. However, the very properties that make plastics so useful, namely their stability and resistance to degradation, are also what cause them to be so problematic after they have served their purpose.
These materials persist in the environment and are not readily degraded or processed by natural biological organisms. Research from the United Nations has outlined that once discarded, plastics are weathered and eroded into very small fragments known as “micro-plastics”. These together with plastic pellets are already found on most beaches around the world, suspended in seawater, and on the seabed in sediments.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals. At least 267 different species are known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris including seabirds, turtles, seals, sea lions, whales and fish.
Research has shown that much of the waste and plastics found at sea originates on land. “The effect of coastal littering and dumping is compounded by vectors such as rivers and storm drains discharging litter from inland urban areas,” says the UNEP report on plastic debris in the world’s ocean.
UNESCO posits that plastic materials and other litter can become concentrated in certain areas called “gyres” as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. “There are now five gyres in our ocean. The North Pacific Gyre, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, occupies a relatively stationary area that is twice the size of Texas.”
According to the UNEP report, “seven of the EU Member States plus Norway and Switzerland recover more than 80% of their used plastics. These countries adopt an integrated waste and resource management strategy to address each waste stream with the best options. However, waste and disposal remain an issue in most of the world.”
This brings us to Guyana, where our culture sadly is to use our roads, lands and rivers as the bins and receptacles for our plastic and other wastes. This is invariably contributing to the pollution of the oceans. While we have legislative sanctions against littering, they do not seem a formidable deterrent since littering continues unabated.
Thankfully, from an institutional level our leaders are pushing for Guyana to become a green economy. Part of the push entails the ban on the importation and use of Styrofoam in Guyana. Once we have exhausted our domestic supply of existing food boxes, plates and cups, etc, made of Styrofoam, it is expected that the ban will be fully implemented and we will have no choice but to use only environmentally safe bio-degradable alternatives. So, in the event, our litter culture does not change, at the very least those biodegradable alternatives will decay after a while.
The problem does not end there though: we have to start making a concerted effort to improve our environment and country by ensuring that other non-biodegradable waste products such as water bottles, other plastics, and aluminium products are safely disposed of and do not reach our ocean, becoming marine debris.
There are recycling plants in Guyana that recycle cardboard and paper; it is not clear whether we have plants that recycle plastics and rubber. In the final analysis, however, we incur clean-up and disposal costs, amounting to millions of dollars, a cost borne by the taxpaying public. It would, therefore, make sense for us to go the route of Norway and the EU member countries and “adopt an integrated waste and resource management strategy to address each waste stream with the best options”. Maybe this is an area that the Government can invest in via a Public-Private Partnership.
