5 Simple ways to reduce plastic waste
Plastics were once seen as miraculous materials that catered perfectly to our culture of convenience – cheap, lightweight, easily mass-produced and simply thrown away after use. However, we soon came to realise that plastics are a lot harder to get rid of, than to create. Most plastic materials never completely degrade; they remain in our environment, slowly being broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, and whilst recycling programmes have been put in place across developed countries, it is thought that just 5% of plastics are recycled effectively, with 40% ending up in landfill and over 30% in the environment. The rest is burnt, creating energy but also consuming more fossil fuels in order to manufacture new plastic materials that are forever demanded by our economies. In the developing world, this explosion in demand for cheap and easily disposable products has grown faster than the ability to deal with the huge amount of plastic waste generated in these boom