The Entire European Union Just Voted To Ban All Single Use Plastics By 2021
The Entire European Union Just Voted To Ban All Single Use Plastics By 2021, as it turns out recycling is not really effective as we've been made to believe.
Why is it still legal to use plastics when so many biodegradable options exist? The BBC has reported that the European Parliament has voted to completely ban single-use plastics in an attempt to put an end to the seemingly unending stream of plastic pollution filling our oceans. Single-use plastic products include anything, as the name suggests, that are used just once and then thrown away. Some of these products are recyclable, however, they are rarely recycled so they end up in our oceans and landfills.
They include items such as: straws, bags, take out containers, cotton swabs and cups.
These items can take several hundred years to degrade in the oceans and are drastically interfering with marine life. 70% of all marine litter is made up of single use plastics, according to the European Commission. After enough public outcry and awareness was raised over the issue — making it known that we need to act fast, a vote at the European Parliament was held and a huge majority were in favor of the ban, 571 yays to 53 nays and 34 abstentions agreeing to enforce this ban by 2021. One MEP said if no action was taken, “by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans”. In addition to the 2021 all out ban on many single use products, the use of plastics for which no alternatives currently exist, such as food packaging, will also be required to be cut down by 25 percent by 2025. 90 percent of beverage containers will also be required to be collected and recycled by 2025. “We have adopted the most ambitious legislation against single-use plastics,” Frédérique Ries, the MEP who proposed the bill, said in a statement. “It is essential in order to protect the marine environment and reduce the costs of environmental damage attributed to plastic pollution in Europe, estimated at 22 billion euros by 2030.” When we already have alternatives available, why wouldn’t we ban such things that are harming and polluting our environment? It is great to see this happening in the European Union, and also many cities across North America, but perhaps the rest of the world isn’t catching on so quickly. Sure it’s up to the consumers to vote with their dollars and put their money where their mouth is so to speak, but at what point will we hold our government officials accountable for what they are legally allowing to continue? Unfortunately, many of us have simply been duped, when it comes to plastic. We have been led to believe that by recycling, we are protecting the environment from plastic pollution. Hate to break it to you, but this is so far from the truth, it’s scary. Hardly anything that we put out in those blue bins actually even gets recycled at all. A large percentage of this “recycling” is shipped to other countries to be “recycled”, but is rarely actually recycled at all, and is often piled up in landfills or even burned. Until recently China was a dumping ground for a large portion of the world’s “recyclable” plastic, but the country is no longer accepting the world’s non-industrial waste. After years and years of collecting so much waste, the Chinese government has now decided to stop collecting foreign trash. What happens to your recycling? The dirty truth is that thousands of tonnes of plastic recycling from British households ends up stockpiled as far away as Hong Kong. But why is our waste being dumped across the planet? #PassOnPlastic Posted by Sky Ocean Rescue on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 It is clear that our current “solution” to all of our plastic waste is not working, as the video says, we need to find a better solution to this epidemic. Recycling standards certainly need to become a lot more strict, and each country should be held responsible for their own recycling and potentially laws should be put in place by the UN that makes it illegal to export plastic waste and recycling, this would then force us to come up with a better option. It is not fair that there is no transparency towards what is really going on with the public. If people really knew, it is likely that they would take a stand against this. Luckily, in developed nations we have alternatives available to us, and we can make a choice to drastically reduce the amount of plastic waste (let’s just call it what it is) we are consuming, with or without a ban on plastics. Unfortunately, in less developed nations, where many our brothers and sisters are struggling just to stay alive, plastic consumption may be the last thing on their mind. Congratulations to the European Parliament for agreeing that this was an issue that was worth doing something about. Having government get involved makes it much easier to create change on a mass scale, and we can hope that other nations will follow suit and hopefully in our lifetimes, their will be no more single use plastics — at all! Especially because we already have so many alternatives available to us. Due to the pressure of mass censorship, we now have our own censorship-free, and ad-free on demand streaming network! It is the world's first and only conscious media network streaming mind-expanding interviews, news broadcasts, and conscious shows. Click here to start a FREE 7-Day Trial and watch 100's of hours of conscious media videos, that you won't see anyw.
Read the full article at the original website
References:
