Trash Talk

Streets and drains have been littered with waste. There have been viral pictures of birds tangled in masks. The amount of rubbish in parks are increasing. During the circuit breaker, Singapore produced an extra 1334 tonnes of plastic waste. Imagine the weight of 92 double-decker buses and then imagine them full of trash. That’s how much extra waste we produced over a span of a few months.

Plastics are not going away. They are an essential part of modern living and contribute to many good things, such as ensuring food hygiene, efficient packaging and proper storage in Singapore’s hot and humid weather. Plastics are durable, light and versatile. However, they take up to 400 years to decompose! When we don’t throw litter into a proper bin, it falls to the ground, goes into the drain, flushes into the canal, then into the sea. By far, the biggest polluter in our waters is plastic mostly in the form of food packaging. Most of the litter on our shores comes from land-based activities in Singapore and not necessarily from ships or boats or other countries.

These plastic bits in the ocean more often than not break up into micro-plastics and get consumed by sea creatures - which are then consumed by people. A study by the World Wide Fund for Nature found that the average person could be ingesting as much as one credit card worth of plastic a week! Isn’t that sufficient motivation to get consumers to care enough about the waste problems to change their daily habits?  

As consumers we have to be more aware of the detrimental effects of plastic pollution, and see the urgency in choosing sustainable options. Reducing packaging waste does not always require big, innovative inventions. A simple act of cutting down on single-use packaging can make a big difference. For example, bringing our own reusable bags or containers when out shopping or dining. It is estimated that that a reusable bag is roughly equivalent to 125 single-use plastic bags if it is used over a year and a reusable container could replace 3,650 pieces of single-use plates or containers if it is used twice a day, every day, over a period of five years.

Many may be “recycling” through the blue bins provided in housing estates. But may not realise that chucking things that do not belong, such as food waste, will only contaminate the whole bin making recycling impossible. 

Plastic packaging cannot be eliminated, but it needs to be recovered. Efforts need to be relentless and continuous. To expedite the move towards a more sustainable future, consumers must play their part by using less plastic, and supporting business and government initiatives that help address this issue. Otherwise, by 2050, there could be more plastics in the ocean than fish by weight.