Forget single-use plastic — we need to rethink ALL of it (+ 25 swaps for the random disposable plastic in your life)

If you don’t know by now that the world is facing a plastic pollution epidemic then you must be living under a rock. But the way we’re (barely) responding, it’s like we’ve crawled underneath one anyway. Governments here and there are planning single-use plastic bans for maybe 5 years time (because we can’t inconvenience the companies who use all this packaging, right?). Single-use plastics are a great place to start when tackling plastic pollution but they’re the very miniscule TIP of the iceberg. We seem to be ignoring all the other plastic as if it isn’t a problem. As if the ONLY items floating about in the ocean are plastic bags, bottles, straws, utensils and coffee cups. Reality check: a MASSIVE assortment of other disposable plastic ends up in our oceans.

I’d like to share my carefully-curated collection of Random Plastic Crap: plastic litter I’ve gathered from my local streets that is not food or drink-related and (mostly) not single-use — the OTHER disposable plastic that hasn’t made the headlines yet. It might be ever-so-slightly less wrong than its more famous single-use cousins but is still of low value and essentially designed to have a short lifespan. It didn’t just become rubbish when it landed on the street, it was rubbish to begin with. If I didn’t have a thing for random stuff, or care a hell of a lot about the planet I live on, this would likely all be in our oceans or inside a dead whale by now…