GARBAGE generated by the recent Dinagyang Festival calls attention to the “plastic crisis” and the growing call for a national ban on single-use plastics.
There is a need to raise awareness about the adverse environmental impacts of single-use plastics, and promote sustainable alternatives.
It is time to ban single-use plastics from shopping bags to drinking straws to halt the destructive plastic incursion of the oceans that has already reached crisis proportions. The marine ecosystems are choking to death because of the plastic wastes and the cocktail of chemicals that are increasingly dumped into water bodies.
Our lawmakers must heed the signs of the times such as the plastic clogged esteros and the eight million tonnes of plastic spilled into the seas every year and take strong action against the unnecessary applications of plastics.
The number of governments and institutions worldwide taking aggressive action to stop the use of single-use plastics continues to grow by the day. This is one area where the Philippines can demonstrate leadership by also banning and phasing-out the use of disposable plastic items like bags, cups, straws, styrofoam food containers, and cutlery nationwide.
The fact that these single-use plastics keep ending up in our oceans, coastal areas and dumpsites prove they are problematic, unrecyclable, and almost impossible to manage. Besides, binging on the use of plastic items that one uses for only a matter of minutes and yet will outlive us by hundreds of years is just plain absurd and irresponsible.
Having signed up to the UN Environment’s #CleanSeas campaign against marine litter, the government should waste no time and make the banning of single-use plastics a national priority to protect fish, a staple food for Filipinos, as well as fish-based livelihoods, which plays a key role in the country’s food security.
According to some studies, if plastic waste spillage from land sources is not discontinued, by 2050 oceans will have more plastic than fish.
