Your Plastic Diet

by Thomas Gomersall

Here’s a question. What do whales, fish and mussels have in common with humans? Answer: They are all unwitting consumers of plastic waste. Microscopic particles created by the breakdown of larger plastics are accidentally consumed by marine animals and later by seafood-eating humans. These particles are lightweight enough to become airborne and leach into our drinking water, meaning that you probably eat, drink and breathe about 5 grams of plastic (the equivalent of one credit card) per week. This plastic ingestion has been linked with disruption to hormone function, respiratory tract inflammation and toxic effects on the lungs, liver and brain cells of pre-natal babies (de Wit and Bigaud, 2019). And those are just the health impacts we know about.

Yet despite these frightening implications, relatively few people are aware of this aspect of plastic pollution. WWF’s new campaign, ‘Your Plastic Diet’, aims to change that. The campaign seeks to educate and inspire stakeholders, including the F&B industry, to become part of the solution.

“We are working with food delivery companies like Food Panda and Deliveroo and are trying to link with Uber Eats. These are the three biggest food delivery companies in Hong Kong” says June Wong, Oceans Conservation Officer for WWF-Hong Kong. “We will create some eye-catching visuals on the paper delivery bags […] to illustrate how much plastic they have in their body.”

Alongside the visuals printed on the paper takeaway bags, there will also be a QR code that links to WWF’s Plastic Diet website, where customers can sign a petition to ban all single-use plastics in the F&B industry by 2022 and for the industry to voluntarily stop using disposable plastics now. In time, this petition and others like it will be delivered to governments in Hong Kong and around the world as proof that people want immediate and substantive action on plastic pollution.

Such petitions have helped to gain massive environmental wins in Hong Kong before, such as the 2018 vote on closing the domestic ivory market. And they can do so again for this. But only if enough people sign them and show that they believe in reducing single-use plastics. So please sign the petition and do everything you can to reduce plastic usage in your day-to-day life.

Meanwhile, if you want to try and reduce your plastic ingestion, try to cut back on eating seafood. Shellfish in particular should be avoided as they are the second-largest source of plastic, being served and eaten with their digestive systems –and any plastic inside them — intact (de Wit and Bigaud, 2019).

External link:

* Your Plastic Diet campaign webpage: https://plasticschange.hk/home-en/

References:

· W. de Wit and N. Bigaud, No Plastic in Nature: Assessing plastic ingestion from nature to people, Gland, Switzerland, WWF, 2019.