You Can Help Stop Plastic Reaching Our Sea. Here’s How
Do these 12 pain-free things, and you’ll stop the amount of plastic that is escaping into our environment and polluting our beautiful Maltese seas.
1. Buy your butter wrapped in paper – you don’t need yet another plastic butter dish.
2. There’s no need to bag your loose fruit and veg, so don’t and avoid buying them in prepacked containers too.
3. Pack your lunch in reusable containers. Don’t forget your own reusable cutlery too!
4. Don’t celebrate events with balloon releases, the chances are the balloons will land in the ocean, choking seabirds, turtles and marine mammals and breaking down into microplastics. Remember plastics do not break up, that just breakdown into smaller and smaller pieces.
5. Use a good, old-fashioned solid bar of soap – it works as well as liquid soap and lasts longer and you avoid the single-use bottle it comes in.
6. Cigarette filters contain a plastic that is very slow to degrade in the environment. It can take anywhere between 18months to 10 years to decompose. Perhaps that is another reason to stop smoking…
7. Take your own coffee cup to the café if you are not planning to drink in. Currently some coffee shops are even offering a discount on your coffee when you take your own cup.
8. Wrap sandwiches in grease-proof paper or reusable beeswax wraps instead of single-use plastic cling film
9. Ditch the plastic toothbrush. Opt for a bamboo or wooden toothbrush instead.
10. Buy beverages in cans instead of plastic bottles. Cans can be repeatedly recycled without losing quality, plastic can only be recycled a few times before it becomes waste.
11. Wear clothes made from natural fibers like cotton, linen, bamboo or hemp vs polyester, nylon or spandex. Each time you wash clothes made from unnatural fibers, they release microplastics into the water that eventually ends up in the sea.
12. Use a refillable pen or opt for a pencil– use one that can be re-filled or better yet ditch plastic pens altogether and use a pencil or mechanical pencil.
