Plastic Free July

Are you going to join in with Plastic-Free July this year? A month of awareness to make swaps in your life to help reduce the amount of plastic heading to landfills and oceans. If you’ve missed any of my posts over on Instagram or Facebook, you can find the below…

Did you know that only 9% of plastic waste has ever been recycled? Some plastic can’t be recycled, some is too expensive to recycle over obtaining new raw materials, and sometimes the recyclers just can’t cope with the amount of plastic heading their way. We don’t currently have the infrastructure to recycle all of our plastic and at the rate it’s being produced, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever catch up.

Unfortunately, this means that our plastic waste is often sold abroad. The exporter obtains their ‘recycled’ credits for selling it to a recycler, but too often, without governance in place, that recycler just dumps it in their own country, or in the oceans.

Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, but it does break down, over a long time, up to 500 years in fact. These microplastics then head into the ground and waterways to further pollute our planet and natural habitat and also end up on the food chain.