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[av_heading heading=’EDITORIAL | Plastic pollution’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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Saturday, July 1, 2017
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A STUDY on plastic wastes generated by coastal countries and entering the oceans should serve as a wakeup call to the Philippine government, the industry, and the public in general. It placed our country the third highest plastic waste generator. It had China at the top followed by Indonesia.
According to the study authors, “population size and the quality of waste management systems largely determine which countries contribute the greatest mass of uncaptured waste available to become plastic marine debris.”
This is what we’ve been talking about. Seventeen years of poor implementation of the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act (Republic Act 9003) and unheeded calls for a national ban on the undoubtedly problematic and persistent plastic bags apparently helped a lot in putting the country at the third place in the study’s embarrassing list. We are a nation of seafarers and fishers, not sea destroyers polluting the oceans with plastics and toxics.
On a global scale, the 2015 “plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean” study calculated that plastic debris reaching the oceans from 192 coastal countries in 2010 was somewhere between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric tons (MT). The amount came from what the report estimated as “275 million MT of plastic waste generated in said coastal countries that year.
The study suggested that some 17.5 million tons a year – that is 155 million tons between now and then – could be entering the oceans by 2025 if nothing is done to check the situation.
Do we now have a clear picture of the magnitude of the frightening impact of this marine plastic pollution?
Beginning today, July 1, plastic bags will be totally banned in Iloilo City after some four years of gradual implementation. In our own small way we’re helping combat this type of pollution. It’s about time Iloilo City bans them to stop the nonchalant disposal of these materials and protect our environment.
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