CAN we clean up the world?
“Good luck picking up other people’s trash!” I couldn’t forget this comment made by a colleague in environmental advocacy. We were in a discussion about plastic waste solutions and I understood (and agreed with) his view that public education is still the best approach to resolve our trash problem rather than having to clean up after everyone.
But what do we do with trash already there, floating in our rivers, coasts and oceans?
We have to clean them up. We can’t turn our backs to waste around us. It’s our collective responsibility as we will all face the consequences.
There have been numerous studies on how plastics break down into very little particles that never decompose but continue to exist and enter our environment, and slowly creep into our food and water. It’s not just about waste management, it’s also about food security and water quality.
Yet we’ve been doing cleanups – our generation has seen a lot of it done – in the last two or three decades. We’ve volunteered, we’ve participated as part of our school’s events, or we’ve done it in unity with our local government.
Around the world in the last week, culminating in the International Coastal Cleanup Day last Saturday, September 16, an estimated 12 million people came together down to beaches and rivers to pick up litter.
So why haven’t we seen the end of trash? Will we ever be able to clean it all up?
By now, cleanup events should already know they should not be giving out to volunteers snacks or drinks in single-use packaging or plastic bottles. It would be ironic, generating the same trash we just picked up!
If this still happens during cleanup events, this only illustrates the vicious cycle of our consumption. There’s also this sad reality that waste collected from the events end up in the same poorly managed loop of waste management that may still bring them back to where they were picked up!
Another colleague commented: “I don’t get it. On one hand, I see so many willing and passionate volunteers joining the cleanups. But I also see so much trash in these same communities where they’re from. There seems to be a disconnect.”
I think that the cleanup movements have also grown to learn what necessary steps need to be taken outside of the organized (and sometimes highly publicized) cleanups. (Do you remember that infamous time when some trash was deliberately thrown into the water so that the Mayor of Manila can pick it up in front of a rolling news camera?). These events are definitely not for show. Yes, we need to encourage other people to do the same and participate, but there must be deeper purposes than just getting the beaches clean.
We need to record trash data. We need to know what are the most common wastes picked up, and their percentage by weight – are they cigarette butts? Plastic water bottles? Plastic bags?
In the past, we had forms printed and filled out to be able to capture statistics of our cleanup efforts. Now there are mobile apps that not only record trash data, but also map out our waste collected.
Let’s do it! World has released “World Cleanup” and the Ocean Conservancy also has “Clean Swell.” These apps can provide valuable intel to the global trash database. Please download them now and start entering information; it will be helpful and useful.
Local organizations like ours, the Philippine Reef and Rainforest Conservation Foundation Inc., is also honing a methodology on getting down to the specific categories of consumer products and packaging that we find being trashed.
We wish to sift through the data of waste collection and find out what consumer goods need redesigns or rethinking in terms of how they were packed, distributed or sold, especially in the local Filipino economic culture.
A big and notable effort is underway with Greenpeace as they have organized their cleanups as “brand audits.” They’re coming from the perspective that companies producing the things we buy need to be responsible for the waste being generated by their businesses.
If a consumer buys soda and it’s being sold in a PET bottle, it is the soda company that has to find a way to recover the PET bottle, recycle it, and to be liable if it somehow ends up as trash elsewhere. So these brand audits will point out the companies that need to listen to consumers’ call for more sustainable and responsible production.
Of course, behaviors of consumers like you and me, matter a lot. We want convenience. Take a deep look into the things we use daily – food that we eat, water that we drink, objects that we use for work – in one way or another, they generate waste, specifically non-biodegradable and plastic waste. We also need to remember, that it took fossil fuel to get these products onto our hands, it took fossil fuel to make the packaging they came up with, and it will take fossil fuel to take them away from us and off to disposal.
Considering consumer behavior and the data we gather from our cleanups, we will need to act timely in terms of stronger and more efficient approaches in policy and education.
This column will tackle these both regularly, especially in terms of the local realities of our city and province. We will also follow the call for a hundred million people taking part in the World Cleanup 2018. I’ll post updates here.
We want to know how to clean up the world because we ultimately believe we need to do it, for our own sakes.