How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Will McCallum has been at the heart of the anti-plastics movement for the past three years, in his role as Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK. He regularly meets with the government and companies to implore them to help tackle the plastic crisis. He leads the global Greenpeace campaign to create the world’s largest protected area in the Antarctic Ocean. He recently spent a month in Antarctica with his team, investigating whether plastic is reaching the most remote region on the planet. He is a keen long-distance runner and regularly goes sea kayaking to explore the UK coast.

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"Can I grab you quickly? Take a look at this."

Grant Oakes, our biosecurity officer on board the Arctic Sunrise, Greenpeace's icebreaker vessel, grabs me from the canteen and takes me to our makeshift lab in the hold where he has set up a microscope. As he rotates the Petri dish a round beneath the lens of the microscope, I focus in on the offending object-hard, bright pink with serrated edges, it is obviously not from natural sources. It seems we have found our first fragment of plastic in the pristine Antarctic waters we are sailing in. A couple more colleagues join us and we take turns to examine it. We cannot confirm whether it is plastic until next month when we will take it back to our laboratory in Exeter University for analysis, but to the untrained eye it is hard to imagine it is anything else. (A few weeks later the results revealed that we had found two fragments of plastic in waters hundreds of miles from permanent human habitation.)

The reaction in the canteen is far from surprised; if anything, we expected to see these results sooner. Greenpeace ships have been testing for plastics in the ocean since the mid-1990s and in the past few years its presence in our trawls has increased more and more across every ocean the ships sail in. As is becoming common practice on each of Greenpeace's three ships, we are taking every opportunity, weather and ice permitting, to do what is known as a manta trawl-using a fine-mesh net, about a meter across at the mouth, to test for plastics in the water. From the frozen Arctic tundra to the deepest trenches in the ocean, scientists have found plastics almost everywhere they have searched, so why not down here in the Antarctic as well, at the bottom of the world, despite its lack of permanent inhabitants.

We have been sailing here for nearly two months now. We are working with scientists, journalists and celebrities to raise awareness about the need to protect this vast wilderness. It is a landscape like none other I have experienced-much of the time clouded in deep fog that occasionally lifts to reveal dramatic peaks and enormous glaciers cascading down into the water. The main topic of conversation on board is the unbelievable abundance of wildlife around us at all times. Fix your gaze on a stretch of water for long enough and you are almost guaranteed to spot the fin of a humpback whale dawdling past or a small group of penguins porpoising out of the water in between the contorted icebergs that surround us. It is sobering to think that even these icy waters, teeming with wildlife wholly unconcerned with us humans, are beginning to be polluted by plastics being produced halfway across the world.

It doesn't take a trip all the way down to the Antarctic to come to this grim conclusion. Everybody I speak to about the issue has had the experience of plastic encroaching on a beloved landscape. It is nearly impossible to visit our favorite beaches or walk along a river without spotting some floating plastic debris drifting menacingly out to sea. The problem of plastic pollution is one close to the heart of so many people because it is affecting all of us, every day. From the tabloids plastering it on the front pages to politicians having lengthy debates in the Houses of Parliament, from ordinary households attempting to go plastic free to celebrity endorsements of products that purport to be better for the environment, everyone is talking about the need to find a solution to the tide of plastic flowing into our oceans.

People across the world have woken up to the ridiculousness of the situation we are in: we managed to create a material and use it at unbelievable scale with no plan for how to deal with it afterward. Single-use plastic cutlery, plastic bags and plastic-lined coffee cups have become central to our lives-used once for a matter of minutes, they will not break down for hundreds of years. It is untenable to carry on like this: we are consigning future generations to a world in which plastic might outweigh fish in the ocean by 2050. This mind-boggling statistic, together with our shared anger at overpackaging and useless plastic products, is galvanizing a global movement prepared to go beyond just talking about the problem and to actually start doing something about it.

This book is for those who want to act now but don't know where to begin. In the face of a problem on this scale it can be hard to work out what your role is; whether you can actually make a difference. I don't claim to have all the answers, far from it, but having spent a few years campaigning to reduce plastics, talking to people about their experiences, negotiating with companies and politicians about what can be done, I've compiled this useful guide to help you play a part in ending ocean plastics. From the kitchen cupboard to the boardrooms of multinational companies, the movement to end plastic pollution needs everyone to come on board and do what they can-at home, where they work and in their community.

If you take one message from the book it is this: that the problem of plastic pollution is one that affects us all, and therefore one for which we all share responsibility as individuals but also, more importantly, collectively. As individuals we can change our behavior, limit our use and help reduce, even by a little bit, the amount of plastic out there. Working together we can achieve much, much more. Amplifying your actions by talking about them with your friends, colleagues and on social media, you can have so much more impact than only working behind closed doors; and joining forces with others in your community to send the message loud and clear to those with more power in politics and business is perhaps the best opportunity we have to get to a world without plastic pollution.

The problem of plastic pollution is one that affects us all, and therefore one for which we all share responsibility as individuals but also,

more importantly, collectively.

My Top Five Steps for Getting Rid of Plastic

Just in case you get no further than this introduction-you lose the book or don't have time-then in the spirit of being a useful guide for anyone, no matter who they are and what their circumstances are, here are my top five steps for getting rid of plastic, right at the very beginning.

1Go on a plastic-free shopping spree. Who would have thought in a book about reducing the amount of waste we produce the top advice for getting rid of plastic was to go and buy a few things? Essential items for a plastic-free life include: a nice water bottle, a reusable coffee cup, a tote bag (or even just a backpack) for your shopping, a lunch box and some kitchen storage containers.

2Go on a plastic-free purge. Start in your bathroom, work your way to the bedroom and then into the kitchen. Have a look at ingredients lists on the back of your cosmetic products to check there aren't any microbeads; empty your cupboards of single-use plastic straws and cutlery. Don't know what to do with it all? You could always send it back to whoever you bought it from with a message that, in your household, single-use plastic is no longer welcome.

3Do some plastic-free preaching. All of us are way more likely to take advice if it comes from our friends and family, rather than just reading about it in a book or watching it on the television. Pass on handy tips to your friends and neighbors (you could even give them a copy of this book). Spread the good news that a plastic-free life is easier than they think, and every little bit helps.

4Make some plastic-free plans. It's true that getting rid of plastic takes a bit of planning. Use a rainy day to sit down and work out which shops near you already use less plastic. Do you have a local grocery that lets you pack your fruit and vegetables however you want? If there are only fast-food outlets near your place of work, spend...