All promised that 100% of their plastic packaging would be reused, recycled or composted within seven years.
The aim is to combat plastic waste pollution, which is harming the seas.
The
Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is behind the campaign, said if
current trends continue, there could be more plastic than fish in the
seas by 2050.
The foundation was launched in 2010 by the record-breaking
yachtswoman to improve environmental standards, particularly on plastic
use, after she was shocked by the level of plastic pollution she
observed on her round the world sailings.
An estimated 8.3 billion
tonnes of plastic had been produced since the early 1950s, with 60% of
it ending up in landfills or the natural environment.
And while
packaging, such as bottles, yoghurt pots and wrappers, is not the sole
source of plastic pollution, it represents the biggest use of plastic.
The move was welcomed by environmental campaigners, Friends of the Earth.
Friends
of the Earth plastics campaigner Julian Kirby said: “It’s encouraging
that more firms and governments are listening to public demands to curb
plastic waste and are pledging to act. A global movement on this issue
is urgently needed.”
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation,
signatories to the pledge – which include big firms like Burberry and
Mars, as well as governments and NGOs – have made commitments to:
Eliminate “problematic or unnecessary” plastic packaging and move from single-use to reusable packaging by 2025
Ensure all plastic packaging can be “easily and safely” recycled or composted
Increase the amounts of plastics reused or recycled into new packaging or products.
One signatory, Marmite-maker Unilever, told the BBC it recycles about
two thirds of the plastic it produces but has been cutting plastic
waste for some time.
In February, stopped sealing its pyramid-shaped PG Tips teabags with polypropylene, using corn starch instead.
‘Circular approach’
It
is also looking at ways of reusing black Tresemme shampoo bottles and
getting recycled plastic into Hellmann’s mayonnaise bottles.
Currently Hellmann’s bottles can be recycled but contain no recycled plastic.
“The
aim is to move towards a circular approach, where you are only using
recycled content and you work toward eliminating single-use packaging,”
Mr Blanchard told the BBC.
“We are seeing consumers wanting
fully recyclable solutions. In the next few years people who use our
products will be looking for packs that are recyclable or use recycled
content, and we will be telling them on the packaging when that’s the
case.”
Dame Ellen MacArthur, founder of the MacArthur Foundation,
said the pledge offered a “clear vision for what we need to create a
circular economy for plastic”.
Signatories have agreed to publish
annual data on their progress, with targets become “increasingly
ambitious” over the coming years.
Me, waking you up at two am: hey, do you ever think about how we live in a culture of rejecting our local “wild places” in favor of fetishizing and romanticizing the distant and different?
There’s this overwhelming rhetoric we’re fed that the only nature worth protecting is Grand and Huge and most of all Somewhere Else.
Nobody thinks about the wetland behind their local Walmart that is in Desperate need of protection, or the little remnant prairie in a cemetery, because they’re too focused on the abstract and often flawed concept of “wilderness” somewhere else.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to travel to see something new and unique, but the way I hear people talk about our own backyard, the way the last remnants of what we have here are ignored or outright rejected, breaks my heart.
My professor has spent his entire career in the Midwest trying to protect wetlands from housing developments and new superstores, but he almsot always loses, not just because the developers have money, but the community doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Afterall, what’s a few old oak and birch trees in a little puddle of a swamp compared to miles of marsh in Scandinavia? What’s a grassy hill to a distant mountain range?
Well, to the duck, to the heron, to the bluebird, and to precious few people, I’d say it’s Everything.
I love to travel myself, and I know people probably don’t know that when they say “why is our wildlife/plant life etc. so lame” that they’re contributing to an attitude of rejecting what unique beauty we do have,
But
I hope one day people can see the wonder nearby and fight to protect it. I hope there’s something left to protect.
Anyway…..where do u keep your cups I want some water.
This year, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Migratory
Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), our most important bird protection law is under
attack. Legislation in Congress (HR 4239), and a new interpretation of
the law by the administration, would end the ability to hold industries
accountable for bird deaths.
These proposals would prevent enforcement of “incidental” bird
deaths, removing incentives for companies to adopt practices that
protect birds from threats such as oil waste pits, and eliminating
penalties for companies that kill substantial numbers of birds,
including from large oil spills.
let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.
picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.
every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.
i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.
i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.
i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.
i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.
or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.
ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.
remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?
i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.
and now look at it.
i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?
if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.
I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.
When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:
“Your regulations are written in blood.”
These regulations were not written on a whim.
They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.
They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?
Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.
Do we also need to fucking talk about the Radium Girls again who slowly fucking rotted alive because the company they worked for deliberately hid knowledge of radium’s effects on living matter?
Lake Chapala, the largest fresh water lake in Mexico, is being taken over by invasive water-weeds. Aipromades, an organization that cares for the lake, partnered with the Peace Corps and IBM Corporate Service Corps to clean it up in economical and environmentally-friendly ways. The weeds, called water hyacinth, spread very fast and cover the lake, which throws off its ecological balance by reducing water flow, oxygen levels and the fish population. The team developed sustainable alternative uses for the water hyacinth and other practical implementation methods to help clean up the lake, so future generations have a clear way to enjoy it and avoid pollution.
Cruises may sink when they collide with something, but there is a place in the world where this works the other way around. Venice is sinking under the destructive effects of these giants.
Venetians have repeatedly thrown themselves into water to try and stop cruises like the one in the picture above from reaching their city. They have been fined for doing so. But they keep doing it. By the way, that picture is not photoshopped.
Every day, up to 60,000 tourists roam through the streets of this city, which only has 55,000 inhabitants. It is not surprising that UNESCO has expressed concern over the “exceptionally high tourism pressure on the city of Venice”.
About 30,000 of those tourists come from cruises.
When each of these cruises arrives to Venice, it looks like a remake of Godzilla, with a huge monster emerging from the sea to make its way through the city. If you have been there, you might have asked yourself “What if one of the maneuvers of that big ship went wrong?”.
But that’s not the reason why Venetians are taking to water to stop these ships. You would assume they are fed up with tourists – which is true, they definitely are – but there’s more than that.
As you might imagine, these cruises are a huge source of pollution. But pollution is not even the main problem here.
The problem is that Venice is sinking. With global warming and the rise in sea level, amidst ever more frequent and intensive flooding, it is clear that this city cannot look to the future optimistically.
Venice won’t be there forever. But it can be helped, we can protect it and if we can’t save it, we can at least make this process slower.
Nature itself seems to try to protect it. This lagoon has always been filled by large watery mud-banks covered with vegetation which acted as a natural barrier from tides. Now this natural barrier is disappearing. A cruise can displace up to 90,000 tonnes of water, this stirs up the lagoon’s sediment, completely changing its seabed and making this city vulnerable to the sea.
If you care about this unique city, if you want to preserve its beauty and let future generations enjoy it as well, please don’t buy a ticket for one of those cruises.
Bristol Bay, home to half the world’s Sockeye salmon population, is about to be destroyed.
“For more than 15 years, Northern Dynasty
Minerals, a Canadian mining company, has sought to build a gold and
copper mine in Bristol Bay. And this spring, the Trump administration
took swift action to make that prospect more likely. Environmental
Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt met on May 1 with the CEO of the
Pebble Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of the mining company, CNN reported on September 22
based on interviews and government emails. Little more than an hour
later, according to internal emails, the administrator directed his
staff to reverse Obama-era protections for Bristol Bay, which had been
created after years of scientific review. Based on that work, the
previous administration had aimed to pre-emptively veto certain mining
activities in the ecologically important region.” (Src)
If this mine goes through: Thousands of jobs will be lost, an entire ecosystem will be destroyed and the world’s Sockeye salmon population will be decimated.
I don’t understand why native grasses aren’t used as yard cover when neighborhoods are built because not only is it better for the environment but it requires way less water (and thus money) and way less upkeep than St. Augustine or whatever shit’s been introduced instead. But no, let’s use water-loving grasses to cover yards in places relying on already overtaxed aquifers, sounds like a good plan to me.
While we’re on the topic of Climate Change, this post and article is worth reading (from my science blog above).
That’s 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it should be at this time of year. I’m especially troubled because my Actual News-Reading Friends are reacting to this with “wait but is that normal, or is it actually global warming?”
Which means that sources like the Washington Post are doing a terrible job of explaining what this actually means. Which is probably a huge part of why people are generally not very concerned about climate change, especially not compared to how bad the situation actually is.
The graph above shows that every single year on record, the amount of ice in the sea has grown and melted at about the same times and in the same amounts. Except this year, when suddenly, instead of a bunch of ice forming in fucking winter, it’s… Not. It’s remaining at summer levels, basically.
This is not just part of global warming, it IS global warming. This is the core of the whole thing. The amazing amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere at an increasing rate for the past 100 years have been trapping more and more heat inside the atmosphere.
This has finally reached the point of Horrible Vicious Cycle. Because when it gets too warm, the polar ice caps melt.
When they melt, the oceans become much warmer and more acidic and can’t sustain life well.
When the oceans get warmer, they stop helping cool the atmosphere. Having large bodies of cold water lying around is GOOD if you want an area to be cooler. Having large bodies of warm water lying around does fuck all for cooling anybody down.
The less the oceans help cool things, the more our carbon emissions affect the atmosphere. Because they’re no longer partly being counteracted by the oceans.
Which means global warming accelerates.
Which means ice melting accelerates.
Which means the oceans get even more fucked up.
Which means global warming accelerates even more.
The reaction to this should not be “wait but is this just a thing that happens, the newspaper didn’t really say,” it should be a massive, front page, global headline of “OH FUCKING SHIT.”
PiraticOctopus 