A double-page spread inside the front cover of a Sunday magazine is prime space for advertisers to entice their clientele with au courant springtime clobber.
A model wearing a ‘must-have’ shirt and a pair of trousers the colour of orange juice clutches a beverage to match, in a clear plastic cup with lid.
But orange juice isn’t hot coffee. It doesn’t need a lid. The director of the fashion shoot may have been worried about getting juice stains on the cream-coloured shirt and possibly having to pay for it. Let’s dismiss it as an ecological wardrobe malfunction.
Unless the advertiser can come back with the claim that the plastic cup in the photo-shoot is now a fully functioning biro-holder – or has found its inert home in the recycled art world – this is one spring fashion plug that has backfired.
Use-once-and-discard takeaway cups were nudged out of vogue last July when the European Parliament’s environment committee voted to strengthen plans to cut plastic pollution.
A combination of extended producer responsibility and raising awareness among consumers is part of the plan to reduce consumption of single-use plastic cups and cutlery. Fashion retailers and their publicity agents need to be more in tune with discerning customers and Europe’s environmental obligations.
Turn the page on the offending advertisement. Peel a banana and throw the skin in the organic waste bag. Feeling better now?
Since the organic collection scheme started in Malta last October, thousands of tons of organic waste have been diverted away from the landfill and turned into a resource. Some of the biomass goes to generate renewable energy and some is turned into compost for landscaping projects.
Disappointingly, there are still frequent reports from the public of organic and mixed waste bags being thrown into the same section of the truck by waste collectors. Hopefully this isn’t the case in your street.
In the garbage bag section of your local shop, the words “degradable”, “bio-degradable” and “compostable” leap off the wrappers of various brands.
If organic waste bags are compostable in line with European standard EN 13432 they are permitted to carry the seedling logo. Certification bodies are licensed by European Bioplastics, the owner of the logo.
The burden of choice is laid on the poorly informed consumer with the only information offered by Wasteserv being that “any white bag is accepted although it is preferable if the white bags are bio-compostable.” It’s not even clear what that means exactly and within what timeframe.
Increasingly surrounded by plastics, bacteria have now evolved to come up with a digestive enzyme allowing them to turn plastic into dinner
Care should be taken since not every “bio-degradable” plastic bag is necessarily compostable. Then there are the oxo-degradable bags, although you probably won’t find this wording anywhere on the bag. A metal-based additive speeds up the breaking down of plastic when exposed to heat or sunlight.
As mentioned in Malta’s amended packaging waste law, the additive breaks the plastic bag down into smaller and smaller fragments, fast-tracking the entry of micro-plastics into our environment. No wonder there has been such strong support at European Parliament level in the past months to get this type of bag banned.
Even bags sold under the heading of “bioplastics” need watching. Sources can include corn, cellulose, petroleum and methane. Studies are lacking on what happens when greenhouse gases are released back into the environment as plastic bags break down. This process could be speeding up, according to recent research.
It is true that Malta struggles to reach recycling targets for the type of plastic soft drinks bottles are made from. But touting PET-guzzling microbes as “the answer to the plastic problem” has been another unhelpful piece of media-hype appearing in the press this month.
Bacteria are very successful at adapting to unusual conditions. Increasingly surrounded by plastics, they have now evolved to come up with a digestive enzyme allowing them to turn plastic into dinner.
A University of Malta study is comparing different rates of plastic deterioration. The research team is conducting a laboratory study on how much faster microbes can “eat” polyethylenes compared to when plastic breaks down under natural conditions in soil or marine environments.
Research projects across the globe have been looking at how manipulating microbial enzymes could hasten the breakdown of plastic. Is this a good thing?
University of Montana philosophy professor and researcher on ethics and public affairs, Christopher Preston predicts that “the border between life and machine will blur” the day engineered microbes are turned loose to devour our plastic garbage. He notes that results from experiments so far have not been dramatic and we are “nowhere near a solution” to the plastic crisis. Messing with microbes might even accelerate other crises:
The effect on climate change of releasing synthetic microbes into the plastic wastelands of our oceans needs to be carefully weighed. Another worry is that bacteria which have been modified to eat plastic in the wild might move on to threaten urban products and structures which were meant to last.
On the subject of the engineering microbes to develop plastic-digesting enzymes, Oxford University enzymolgist Emily Flashman remains cautiously optimistic:
“Antibiotics taught us how slow we have been to outwit bacteria. But perhaps studies such as these will give us a head start.”
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece