What's the
real price of getting rid of plastic packaging?
How much would it cost to switch to plastic alternatives?
Richard Gray crunches the numbers.
Walking along a short section of stony beach, Claire Waluda
stoops briefly to pick up something from between the rocks. It is a brightly
coloured plastic bottle top – just one of hundreds of bits of plastic that she
finds washed ashore on the remote, windswept island of South Georgia.
Located in the south Atlantic, on the fringes of the
Antarctic, it is nearly 1,000 miles (1,500km) from the nearest major human
settlement. Yet even here Waluda, an ecologist with the British Antarctic
Survey, is finding worrying signs of our throw-away attitude towards plastic.
Regularly she finds seals entangled in this debris or albatross chicks coughing
up bits of plastic film.
These are just a few examples of the damage our throw-away
relationship with plastics is inflicting on the environment. More than 78 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced worldwide every year by an industry
worth nearly $198 billion. Just a fraction of that is recycled while the vast majority is thrown away. Plastic litter now clutters every part of our planet, from
remote parts of the Antarctic to the deepest ocean trenches.