“Beat Plastic Pollution”: World Environment Day 5 June

This year’s World Environment Day theme is; “Beat Plastic Pollution” – a call to action for all of us to come together to combat one of the great environmental challenges of our time.

Here’s a video we made of David Raine for his campaign; Jimmy Ocean Project; a creative way to turn polluting ocean plastic into funky solar powered lamps to raise awareness of polluting plastic and it’s affects on marine life.

Jimmy Ocean loves fantastic adventures – Plastic pollution and saving oceans is his thing. His latest book ‘The Big Whizzo‘ is available on Amazon

“Plastic in the ocean lasts forever; it just degrades to a microscopic form and then enters the marine food chain.” – David Attenborough

Though plastic has many valuable uses, we’ve become over reliant on single-use or disposable plastic which has severe environmental consequences. Around the world, 1 million plastic drinking bottles are purchased every minute. 500 billion disposable plastic bags are used worldwide every year. In total, 50 per cent of the plastic we use is single use.

Plastic bags are notorious for killing sea turtles, which mistakenly think they are jellyfish and eat them. In 2002 Bangladesh is the first country in the world to implement a ban on thin plastic bags, after it was found they played a key role in clogging drainage systems during disastrous flooding. Other countries begin to follow suit.

“Worldwide one million plastic bags are consumed every minute.”

If you can’t reuse it, refuse it

This year’s World Environment Day provides an opportunity for each of us to embrace the many ways that we can help to combat plastic pollution around the world.

There are so many things that we can do, from asking the restaurants you frequent to stop using plastic straws, to bringing your own coffee mug to work, to pressuring your local authorities to improve how they manage your city’s waste. Here are some other specific ideas:

Bring your own shopping bags to the supermarket
Pressure food suppliers to use non-plastic packagin
Refuse plastic cutlery
Pick up any plastic you see the next time you go for a walk on the beach

More info can be found at www.worldenvironmentday.global

What else can we do to tackle this problem? Share your ideas on social media using the hashtag #BeatPlasticPollution. Share your thoughts in the comment box below!

The DoGoodFilms team

Find out more about Ivo, DoGoodFilms Services, or CONTACT US!