ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Will McCallum has been at the heart of the anti-plastics movement for the past three years, in his role as Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK. He regularly meets with the government and companies to implore them to help tackle the plastic crisis. He leads the global Greenpeace campaign to create the world’s largest protected area in the Antarctic Ocean. He recently spent a month in Antarctica with his team, investigating whether plastic is reaching the most remote region on the planet. He is a keen long-distance runner and regularly goes sea kayaking to explore the UK coast. He credits his love of nature and the outdoors to his grandparents, Doctor Dolittle and David Attenborough’s nature documentaries.

PENGUIN LIFE

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Penguin Life is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published 2018

Copyright © Will McCallum, 2018

Chapter opening illustrations © Jennifer Brogger, 2018

The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted

Text design by Janette Revill

The information in this book reflects the views of the author and not the views of the organization Greenpeace. So far as the author is aware the information given is correct and up to date as at May 2018.

Cover illustration © Jennifer Brogger

ISBN: 978-0-241-36322-5

To those who are struggling daily against the tide of plastic pollution across the world – all power to you and I hope this book helps a bit

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 A Short History of Fighting Plastic

2 The Problem with Plastic

3 Stories of Hope and Success – A Global Movement Against Plastic

4 How Can One Person Make a Difference?

5 Giving Up Plastic in the Bathroom

6 Giving Up Plastic in the Bedroom

7 Giving Up Plastic in the Kitchen

8 Giving Up Plastic on the Go

9 Giving Up Plastic in the Nursery

10 Giving Up Plastic in the Workplace

11 Giving Up Plastic in Your Community

12 What Does the Future Hold?

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Preface

The issue of plastic pollution in the ocean and the environment has exploded into the public consciousness like no other environmental issue in recent history. Tens of millions of people across the world watched Blue Planet II, David Attenborough’s blockbuster series, gasping in shock at the scene where an albatross fed its chicks small pieces of plastic, mistaking them for food. We have all experienced that moment of walking somewhere beautiful and seeing in our path a stray piece or pile of plastic spoiling our surroundings. Scientific understanding of the impact of plastic pollution, as well as knowledge of the solutions to prevent it getting worse, is still in its relative infancy – and yet as we understand more and more about the scale of the problem the desire to act grows stronger.

In the years I have spent campaigning against plastic the most common question I am asked is, ‘What can I do to help?’ How to Give Up Plastic provides you with the knowledge you need and guides you to make informed choices about getting rid of plastic in your own life. It would be impossible to include alternatives for every plastic product within these pages, and at the current rate of research and innovation there will be many new alternatives just months after I’ve finished writing, so this book includes plenty of sources where you can do your own research about products not covered here. It also equips you with the facts about the issue and the campaign tools necessary to help persuade others, including friends, family, colleagues, local businesses and politicians, to join you on the journey to creating a world where plastic pollution may be a thing of the past.

For the most part when talking about plastic in this book, I am referring to single-use plastic – i.e. plastics that are used once and then thrown away, often taking centuries to break down. Items like plastic bags, straws, coffee cups and plastic packaging. I focus on these because as well as posing an increasingly large problem to the world’s oceans, these items are where we as individuals can have the biggest impact, in our own homes and communities. Also because, in my opinion, they epitomize the problem with plastic. It is not that this material – cheap, flexible and in many instances life-saving when it comes to medical uses – is inherently bad. Rather, that we have developed a throwaway culture around single use that is not healthy, for society or for the oceans – and if the plastic crisis in our seas has any silver lining at all, it may be that it provides the catalyst to snap us out of this destructive pattern.

Finally, a word at the beginning about the necessity of plastic to some people’s lives, whether it be due to mobility issues requiring someone to drink through a straw or that where they live the water from the tap is unsuitable to drink – there are on occasion good reasons for using single-use plastics. These exceptions to the rule mean that in our quest to get rid of plastic it is important not to immediately point the finger before first understanding individual circumstances. Circumstances that should not be used as an excuse by companies and governments to forgo action and innovation to find alternatives – as explained in the excerpt written by Jamie Szymkowiak, founder of disability rights organization One in Five, here. Plastic has become so pervasive that if we want to have any chance of success, giving it up has to be a journey that brings people together, no matter what their circumstances.

Introduction

‘Can I grab you quickly? Take a look at this.’

Grant Oakes, our biosecurity officer on-board the Arctic Sunrise, Greenpeace’s icebreaker vessel, grabs me from the canteen and takes me to our makeshift lab in the hold where he has set up a microscope. As he rotates the Petri dish round beneath the lens of the microscope, I focus in on the offending object – hard, bright pink with serrated edges, it is obviously not from natural sources. It seems we have found our first fragment of plastic in the pristine Antarctic waters we are sailing in. A couple more colleagues join us and we take turns to examine it. We cannot confirm whether it is plastic until next month when we will take it back to our laboratory in Exeter University for analysis, but to the untrained eye it is hard to imagine it is anything else. (A few weeks later the results revealed that we had found two fragments of plastic in waters hundreds of miles from permanent human habitation.)

The reaction in the canteen is far from surprised; if anything we expected to see these results sooner. Greenpeace ships have been testing for plastics in the ocean since the mid-1990s and in the past few years its presence in our trawls has increased more and more across every ocean the ships sail in. As is becoming common practice on each of Greenpeace’s three ships, we are taking every opportunity, weather and ice permitting, to do what is known as a manta trawl – using a fine-mesh net, about a metre across at the mouth, to test for plastics in the water. From the frozen Arctic tundra to the deepest trenches in the ocean, scientists have found plastics almost everywhere they have searched, so why not down here in the Antarctic as well, at the bottom of the world, despite its lack of permanent inhabitants.

We have been sailing here for nearly two months now. We are working with scientists, journalists and celebrities to raise awareness about the need to protect this vast wilderness. It is a landscape like none other I have experienced – much of the time clouded in deep fog that occasionally lifts to reveal dramatic peaks and enormous glaciers cascading down into the water. The main topic of conversation on-board is the unbelievable abundance of wildlife around us at all times. Fix your gaze on a stretch of water for long enough and you are almost guaranteed to spot the fin of a humpback whale dawdling past or a small group of penguins porpoising out of the water in between the contorted icebergs that surround us. It is sobering to think that even these icy waters, teeming with wildlife wholly unconcerned with us humans, are beginning to be polluted by plastics being produced halfway across the world.

It doesn’t take a trip all the way down to the Antarctic to come to this grim conclusion. Everybody I speak to about the issue has had the experience of plastic encroaching on a beloved landscape. It is nearly impossible to visit our favourite beaches or walk along a river without spotting some floating plastic debris drifting menacingly out to sea. The problem of plastic pollution is one close to the heart of so many people because it is affecting all of us, every day. From the tabloids plastering it on the front pages to politicians having lengthy debates in the Houses of Parliament, from ordinary households attempting to go plastic free to celebrity endorsements of products that purport to be better for the environment, everyone is talking about the need to find a solution to the tide of plastic flowing into our oceans.

People across the world have woken up to the ridiculousness of the situation we are in: we managed to create a material and use it at unbelievable scale with no plan for how to deal with it afterwards. Single-use plastic cutlery, plastic bags and plastic-lined coffee cups have become central to our lives – used once for a matter of minutes, they will not break down for hundreds of years. It is untenable to carry on like this: we are consigning future generations to a world in which plastic might outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050. This mind-boggling statistic, together with our shared anger at over-packaging and useless plastic products, is galvanizing a global movement prepared to go beyond just talking about the problem and to actually start doing something about it.

This book is for those who want to act now but don’t know where to begin. In the face of a problem on this scale it can be hard to work out what your role is; whether you can actually make a difference. I don’t claim to have all the answers, far from it, but having spent a few years campaigning to reduce plastics, talking to people about their experiences, negotiating with companies and politicians about what can be done, I’ve compiled this useful guide to help you play a part in ending ocean plastics. From the kitchen cupboard to the boardrooms of multinational companies, the movement to end plastic pollution needs everyone to come on-board and do what they can – at home, where they work and in their community.

If you take one message from the book it is this: that the problem of plastic pollution is one that affects us all, and therefore one for which we all share responsibility as individuals but also, more importantly, collectively. As individuals we can change our behaviour, limit our use and help reduce, even by a little bit, the amount of plastic out there. Working together we can achieve much, much more. Amplifying your actions by talking about them with your friends, colleagues and on social media, you can have so much more impact than only working behind closed doors; and joining forces with others in your community to send the message loud and clear to those with more power in politics and business is perhaps the best opportunity we have to get to a world without plastic pollution.

The problem of plastic pollution is one that affects us all, and therefore one for which we all share responsibility as individuals but also, more importantly, collectively.