3 Industries that need to reduce single use plastic

Climate change is real guys, even though Trump doesn’t believe it, you have to believe it.

Google “dirty ocean”, images of trash being trashed into the ocean will surface easily. Cigarette butts, straws, bottles, plastic bag, whatever people use them for one time, you can find it in the ocean.

Why do you need to care? Well, if you are not a surfer or a diver, you probably don’t have but if you need to make sure your next generation gets to enjoy the world then yes, you have to care. When do you need to care? Like, right now cause based on research, our earth will kind of run out of resources in 2050.

True or not, it’s time we treat ourselves better too. Although everyone has the responsibility, I think these 3 industries can definitely do it in a larger scale and much effective in reducing single use plastic.

1. Travel Industry

During my travel to Chiang Mai-Chiang Rai, I realised the amount of single use plastic travellers/tourists used, it’s crazily a lot. You drink from a coconut, you use a straw, you eat from a restaurant, their fork and spoon is wrapped in a plastic wrapper, every van ride, you are given a small plastic bottle of water. 

Every minute or moment, I feel like I’m stuffed with things wrapped with single use plastic. Even the coconut flesh that was cut out as a whole has a plastic box to put it in. During those moments, it felt that what I was trying to do with my stainless steel straw was so helpless, I was sometimes tempted to just give up and join the single use plastic clan.

There’s so much the travel agencies or tourism ministry can do to avoid these from happening. Tour agencies can encourage travellers to use lesser single use plastic by reducing the usage of water bottle throughout the journey and restaurants can be banned from wrapping utensils with plastic and be encouraged to wash or sterilise their utensils instead. We can even choose to drink coconut water from a reusable cup.

This restaurant did a great job in reducing single use plastic and it's stylish!

2. Conferences promoting sustainability

This is always the moment when you feel very conflicted and contradicting to what you believe in sustainability. Conferences promoting the sustainable development goals or plans to discuss about climate change always does this. They always have plastic water bottle for few hundred or sometimes thousands of participants. Plus, it ain’t one plastic bottle per participant, if you finish drinking from your bottle or if you are half way done, you can get a new one too.

I always believed that if an organisations decides to organise a conference or a session that promotes sustainability, it has to walk the talk. It’s not about putting up statistics about how serious our air pollution is or ways of how we can reduce pollution. It is literally about helping people to see that walking the talk about sustainability is possible.

However, most of the time, it’s all about branding for sponsors or the organisers too. The logos has to appear on the water bottle or the booklet/notebook that we might not use them during the conference. We might need to rethink of a new branding strategy in the future, like digitalising them?

3. Food and Beverage Industry

This might be contradicting to what we do in PichaEats as we also honestly use single use plastic fork and spoon, plastic boxes or bowls. However, I am not here to condemn the FnB outlets or restaurants because we understand the struggle.

Recyclable or bio-degradable products are just so expensive in cost to procure in Malaysia. A bio-degradable meal box cost RM0.50 but to opt and use plastic packaging is always 4 to 5 times lesser and many restaurants opt to the plastic option to lower down cost. (However, Foodabox has a better solution, go google about them)

We can consider using edible forks and spoons instead of the plastic ones but our technology has not worked out in a way that we can procure them yet. We tried ordering them from India and it never reach to us either. 

Note that I am not here ranting about the problems, we should continue to seek ways to reduce the usage of plastic in our packaging or processes. However, big manufacturers should consider changing the course of direction in manufacturing more bio-degradable products, work on getting the cost down for food businesses so that we can all prosper together while saving the earth. The more people buy them, the more accessible it is.

Well, there are more industries that should look into the overall sustainability too. These few are just based on my observation and it shouldn’t be just their responsibility, it supposed to be everyone’s responsibility.

Go meatless once a week, bring your own water bottle (I am sometimes guilty for this, ops!), use stainless steel straw instead of the plastic ones, bring your own Tupperware for take-out food, buy pre-love items, use the public transport once a week, throw your own trash into the bin not the river or the ocean, bring a tote bag when you are shopping.

My point is, we can do this and when 1 person starts doing it, the 2nd person does and then the 3rd person does and eventually it will become a clan. Do not despise those who don’t, encourage them to do so together because saving the earth requires everyone and not you alone!