Your role in breaking Thailand’s plastic habit

By The Nation

 

 

Simple, daily actions are key to halting a public addiction that is threatening our health and environment  

 

The war of words between Manila and Ottawa over tonnes of Canadian trash shipped to the Philippines reveals the seriousness of the garbage problem facing countries all around the world. 

 

The recent row involved 103 shipping containers transported from Vancouver to Manila between 2013 and 2014. The containers were labelled as recyclable plastics but instead contained household waste. The Canadian government only agreed to retrieve the garbage after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to declare war. After weeks of protests, bargaining and ultimatums, the trash was finally shipped back to Canada last week.

 

The richer countries become, the more garbage their people tend to produce. Much of the waste is plastic, which pollutes the environment in many ways. Plastic trash, particularly petroleum-based items, takes several centuries to decompose. Burned, it pollutes the air. Discarded, it fouls our waterways and oceans. Here it is consumed by fish and other animals, decimating wildlife and posing a health threat to humans when catches reach the dinner table.

 

Thailand and its Asean partners Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia generate among the highest amounts of marine debris. Thailand ranks seventh among the world’s top 10 sea polluters. 

 

Wealthy nations believed they had found a solution by exporting their plastic waste to developing countries for recycling.  It is cheaper for them to pass the problem on to less wealthy countries – where laws protecting the environment usually far more lax. 

 

Until last year, China was the world’s leading recycler – importing nearly half of the planet’s plastic trash for three decades. But when Beijing banned the practice last year, other countries in Asia, Thailand included, began increasing their plastic waste imports, raising concerns about damage to their environments.

 

Worry is especially high in Thailand, where the casual use of single-use plastic already helps churn out 2 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, of which only 500,000 tonnes is recycled.

 

Last August, national parks around the country began banning single-use plastic and Styrofoam containers. More recently, shopping malls, convenience stores and large retailers have adopted measures aimed at reducing plastic waste. Some have stopped giving bags out one day a week, encouraging customers to bring their own. Others reward customers who decline the offer of plastic totes. Recently Central department stores stopped giving out plastic bags altogether, while Tesco Lotus has banned Styrofoam containers.

 

All this is good news for the environment and deserves praise. However, much tougher measures must be taken if we are to kick a plastic habit that is literally trashing our land and seas.

 

The bag bans have been well-received by the public, but now authorities need to follow up and double down. Thailand could follow the lead of other countries and prohibit free plastic bags at all stores, forcing customers to “pay ahead” for the environmental toll taken by the totes. This would encourage a habit of carrying their own bags, just as shoppers in many developed countries do.

 

Meanwhile, we can start replacing polluting petroleum-based plastics with their biodegradable equivalents.

 

The growing problem of trash choking our environment and food chains will not be solved overnight. But the link between our habits and the visible and hazardous problem is becoming more obvious with each trash-infested day. Most of us can do something to kick our casual addiction to plastic. Try setting an example by refusing a bag at the till. Such small actions can balloon into a social habit that begins cutting down the daily trash mountain, not adding to it.  

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/opinion/30370637

 

-- © Copyright The Nation 2019-06-06

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58 minutes ago, webfact said:

The richer countries become, the more garbage their people tend to produce.

Considering the events of the past 24 hours, I can only agree with this editorial!

Hey, this article is completely wasted on foreigners as none of us uses plastics commercially, translate this article to Thai and published it in giant fonts in every thai newspaper and billboard to reach the 10 of millions of local merchants who are using plastic bags and other utensils for everyday life, but unless the government will outlaw the excessive use of plastics, nothing will change...

Out here in the countryside we dont make too many visits to the big supermarkets but buy most of our daily needs from the local market. Sadly the market that once offered goods mostly wrapped in leaf is now the great contributor to the plastic collection. One small serving of noodles gets a bag for the dry contents, a bag for the liquid and a small carrier to hold it by. Or there is the Styrofoam box plus a plastic spoon or fork, or the cold drink in the plastic cup with a bag to hang on your m'bike handle bars. Plus of course anywhere from the market to the villages you will find a trail of these items as they are discarded after consumption. Its going to take a revolution to change these habits and sellers dont care and schools are not tackling it.

1 hour ago, ezzra said:

Hey, this article is completely wasted on foreigners as none of us uses plastics commercially, translate this article to Thai and published it in giant fonts in every thai newspaper and billboard to reach the 10 of millions of local merchants who are using plastic bags and other utensils for everyday life, but unless the government will outlaw the excessive use of plastics, nothing will change...

As we know already, the government isn't interested in reducing the production or consumption of plastic. All they're interested in is improving their own lives, irrespective of whose lives it affects either way. So no, sadly nothing will change.

Unless on the off-chance someone in power manages to spin it into an opportunity to make money.

as I understand it, it's the same as Co2.  we already have unleashed more than enough to last us longer than the oldest human will, or ever has (that's my evidence) lived.  about 120 years.  yes????  i.e. "carbon removals" is the wording Obama signed to at Paris..... 4 years ago now.  signed and did almost nothing else (to scale, my dearies).

same with plastic. 

the oceans will be chomping on smaller bits of plastic we long ago expelled.  for longer than humans will still be here.  and not because of old age.  electrolytes.

what our wonderful media, and "green" experts never talk about, is stuff like the Rosenfeld study in Science a few months ago now that says that "dirty pollution" has been underestimated as to it's negative forcing on "boring stuff" like the IPCC forcings chart.  and not even Rosenfeld dared, for political reasons, to spell any of that out any more clearly, for example did not mention aerosols and PM have a persistency of only a few weeks or months..... instead they put it as "we might want to revisit our Climate models".

as always, it's the "green" people that lead the way to signing agreements, endorsing "green" products, blowing up balloons that say "we care!" and doing some token projects of some kind.  Trump is building a better border wall to passively stop Climate refugees we would not have the heart to stop, none of us, yet that are already being forced to head north.... not because they admire the USA or Canada but because it has already begun you dullard "green" people.  duh.  

Edited June 6, 20197 yr by WeekendRaider

To answer the question, buy a 20$ Clean the Ocean bracelet, one pound of plastic cleared for every bracelet purchased, though It is rumoured their profit margin is 18$ on every bracelet purchased and pound of ocean plastic cleared. Still, everyone has to make a dollar, right?

6 hours ago, webfact said:

The richer countries become, the more garbage their people tend to produce. Much of the waste is plastic,

Thailand must be super rich then.

A lot of the downstream petrochemical production here is geared to plastic manufacture. Add to the fact the demise of CD's / DVD as a media used by everyone, poly-carbonate production has been modified for the normal plastic fare. Hence plastic here is over-produced for next to nothing, and large corporations like CP own big shares in the production facilities, so bang the bags out willy-nilly in any of their supermarkets / 7-11 stores.

Take your own bag into a supermarket or 7-11. You never know, it might catch on..

6 hours ago, Lungstib said:

Out here in the countryside we dont make too many visits to the big supermarkets but buy most of our daily needs from the local market. Sadly the market that once offered goods mostly wrapped in leaf is now the great contributor to the plastic collection. One small serving of noodles gets a bag for the dry contents, a bag for the liquid and a small carrier to hold it by. Or there is the Styrofoam box plus a plastic spoon or fork, or the cold drink in the plastic cup with a bag to hang on your m'bike handle bars. Plus of course anywhere from the market to the villages you will find a trail of these items as they are discarded after consumption. Its going to take a revolution to change these habits and sellers dont care and schools are not tackling it.

This is the real problem: "...anywhere from the market to the villages you will find a trail of these items as they are discarded after consumption."

All Thailand needs to do to 'Break the Plastic Habit' is to outlaw single-use plastics.
All retailers needs to do to 'Break the Plastic Habit' is to stop buying single-use plastics from the Petro-Chemical industry who produces it.

But -- it's much more convenient to blame the consumers.  
That's total BS.

Tell 7-Eleven staff to STOP handing out plastic spoons/straws/bags/etc. with every purchase. Same with the hypocrites at Makro who on one hand don't give free plastic bags, but continue to sell colossally-huge amounts of products packaged in multiple layers of single-use, throw-away plastic.  Also note both companies belong to CP Group who also attempt to control your lives with True Move, True Visions, True internet, KFC, and of course CP Foods who are responsible for much of the large-scale burning and smoke each year to clear land for corn to make animal feed. 

Edited June 6, 20197 yr by Captain_Bob