SAY NO TO SINGLE-USE PLASTIC

From cups to plates, straws, and cutlery, single-use plastic has found its way into our everyday lives, making it almost impossible to imagine our world without plastic. Being durable, lightweight, and cheap, this convenient material has experienced a boom in all sectors - residential, commercial, corporate, and industrial – leading to the notorious use-and-throw-culture.?

A whopping 79% of single-use plastic has accumulated in landfills and water bodies packing the world’s oceans with a constantly increasing number of floating plastics. Besides having devastating effects on humans and wildlife, these plastics also become a part of the food chain for marine life. Disposable plastics emit toxic greenhouse gases such as methane and ethylene when exposed to direct sunlight. Every year, millions of animals are killed by plastics due to strangling or by consumption that leads to starvation as the urge to eat is reduced when the digestive tracts are blocked with plastics. Commonly used disposables might last in our homes for mere minutes to hours but persist in the environment for centuries. Items such as a coffee cup take up to 30 years to decompose while plastic straws can live up to 200 years in landfills. A plastic water bottle has a life cycle of over 450 years and the recent coffee pods might take up to 500 years to disintegrate.?

Countries across the globe, have introduced strict regulatory measures to shift attitudes towards single-use plastics. Kenya’s extremely harsh law against plastic bags has been quite effective and people have opted for reusable bags rather than plastic ones to avoid landing up in jail for 4 years or paying a hefty fine of $38000.?

In March 2020, the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi (EAD) announced that plastics will be banned completely by 2022. Plastic cutlery, straws, beverage cups with lids, stirrers, etc. will be subject to fees and plastic bottles will be targeted through a return scheme. Dubai has recently announced that single-use plastic bags will cost 25 fils at restaurants, retail stores, and e-commerce deliveries across the Emirate, starting July 1, 2022. The strategy will be assessed at different stages until single-use carrier bags are totally phased out within two years.

Enviroserve, being UAE’s one of the largest integrated recyclers, has made it easy for individuals and organizations to discard their waste the right way with a vast network of collection & recycling options across the region. Green Truck, Enviroserve’s private recycling service in Dubai provides doorstep collection of recyclables and electronic waste every week. It is essential that we drastically reduce our use of single-use plastics and eliminate our plastic footprint because environmental change is inevitable, but our response isn’t.

To know more visit- www.greentruck.ae?