Waste Recyclers Fiji Ltd (WRFL) staff members at the Global Recycling Day event in Suva. Picture: SUPPLIED

This week my eyes caught an article that interested me.

It was headlined ‘Waste Management’.

In the opinion piece, Amitesh Deo, the director and CEO of Waste Recyclers Fiji Ltd talked about the need to shift from the idea clean up campaigns, which he said was literally the moving of waste from one area to another .

Deo suggested the need to focus attention on reducing the amount of waste we produce, waste that ends up choking our planet and polluting our land, rivers and oceans.

Waste management is a big problem not only in Fiji. It is a global issue.

But for big ocean states, a term I prefer to small island developing states, it is a chronic problem when we think of our island size and growing populations.

We just have to look at the island atolls of Micronesia, where land is scarce and water is very limited, to understand how big a problem it is.

One of the biggest contributors to our wastage problem is the issue of single-use plastics.

Plastic has many valuable uses — no doubt about that, but the problem is we have developed an addiction for single-use plastic products.

We use a lot of biodegradable products too, which is good, but we still use them once, and throw them away.

We are doing it with our biodegradable shopping bags.

They are supposed to be re-cycled but we treat them like single-use plastics and they add to our solid waste dilemma.

We hardly stop to consider the severe environmental, social, economic and health consequences of the way we dispose things we consumer.

United Nations statistics show that around the world, ‘one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute’ while up to ‘five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year’.

In total, half of all plastic produced is designed for single-use purposes – used just once and then thrown away.

“Plastics including microplastics are now ubiquitous in our natural environment,” the UN says.

“They are becoming part of the Earth’s fossil record and a marker of the Anthropocene, our current geological era. They have even given their name to a new marine microbial habitat called the “plastisphere”.

Though plastic polymer was first discovered in 1869 by John Wesley Hyatt it did not become a revolution until the early 20th century when in 1907 Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite.

Bakelite was the first fully synthetic plastic. It was a good insulator, durable, heat-resistant and suited for mass production.

Then, a little bit later, chemists discovered that waste products from oil companies could be used to make building blocks (monomers) of polymer materials such as polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which is used in plastic bottles.

Prior to plastics, polymer was sourced from things such as trees, tortoise and elephant ivory, which was used to make things like combs, accessories, piano keys and billiard balls, among a few things.

A New York Times, in a report written in 1867, noted that because of a reward of a few shillings per head being offered by the authorities in Ceylon (today called Sri Lanka) “3,500 elephants were dispatched in less than three years by the natives”.

The paper warned then that elephants were in grave danger of being “numbered with extinct species” because of humans’ insatiable demand for the ivory in their tusks.

Then, ivory from animals were used to produce a wide range of items — from button hooks to boxes, piano keys to combs.

So the invention and use of plastics, in some way, spared the life of trees and elephants of the world and prevented their numbers from dwindling in the wild much earlier, while plastics were mass produced from factories.

According to National Geographic’s June 2018 issue, the “dark side of plastics” emerged when they became so cheap to produce and humans started producing things we didn’t intend to keep for long.

In other words, we started making products such as plastic bags, cups, plates and other items that could be used and thrown away soon afterwards, or otherwise called single-use plastics.

Life became a ‘picnic’ but on the horizon a world problem dawned.

Today, approximately eight to 10 million tonnes of plastic debris enter the ocean each year.

The problem has been attributed to unsustainable behaviour including poor disposal methods, weak law enforcement and legislation, ineffective waste management systems and unknown leakage sources, among others.

In a 2019 study conducted under the three-year “Pacific Waste Free Islands” project in Fiji, it found that around 19,667 tonnes of plastic material was imported into the country and from these 4880 tonnes were leaked into the environment.

The data revealed that around 40 per cent of the leaked plastic waster came from the household sector which is equivalent to around 1939 tonnes of plastic waste and 45 per cent came from commercial businesses.

The fishery sector leaked around 2.9 tonnes of consumable plastics and about 19.9 tonnes of fishing gear.

In the tourism sector, tourists generated seven times more plastic waste per person a day than a Fijian resident and 13 per cent of tourism waste is plastic.

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania regional director Mason Smith, during a global symposium last month said as developments and economics rose, so too would our consumption of pollutant making products.

“In these instances without thought to the environment, we contribute to the introduction of harmful materials into our pristine environment right here in Oceania,” he said.

“Plastic pollution is no doubt the most challenging to tackle in the past 40 years and the science is clear, plastic pollution is a problem that we need to fix.”

The Fijian Government banned the import and export of all polystyrene products from January 1, 2021 and has completely banned the manufacture, sale, supply and distribution of polystyrene containers, cups, plates, and trays from 1 August, 2021.

Fiji also banned the importation of non-degradable plastics into the country in addition to controlling the importation of plastic into the country.

Plastic produced within the country is also regulated.

Deo had pointed out this week that there should be no need for clean-up campaigns if ‘we all took personal responsibility’ when it comes to managing and recycling waste.

“Cleanup campaigns lull people into a false sense of the ‘I will just litter because someone else will pick it up,” he said.

“We must slowly begin to move away from this mindset because it breeds the very behaviour we are trying to change.”

The bottom line is, waste cannot be reduced without a system that effectively manages waste from the point of generation through to disposal. And that is not government’s job alone.

First and foremost, everyone must be responsible for the rubbish we create from the things we consume.

Until we meet on this same page same time next week.

Copyright © 2022 Fiji Times Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2022 Fiji Times Limited. All Rights Reserved.