It’s Everybody’s Responsibility to Solve the Plastic Problem

The world we live in is the sum total of our actions.

Watching the top business and political leaders converge at the World Economic Forum annual summit in Davos, it’s not hard to get caught up in the spectacle.

Here are the preeminent minds of our time, and Donald Trump, meeting to discuss the future of the planet.

These men and women are successful business leaders, politicians and technologists, if anyone is aware of the challenges humanity faces today, surely it is them?

However, the more of this spectacle you take in, the more you become complacent. There is a lot of talk — there is always talk. But where is the action?

I remember the famous incident in 2019 when historian Rutger Bregman decried these very same people for skirting around the issues and not attacking the crux of them. This year we have the same scenario with Greta Thunberg. The focus of the summit this year is the climate.

As we have seen from what is going in Australia, the planet is in a fragile state. Yet you have the contradiction of thousands of business leaders and politicians flying into Davos on private jets to discuss what can be done to improve the climate.

Actions speak louder than words, and so far, the actions do not correlate with what is being said.

The more I thought about this, the more I realised these annual meetings in Davos are pointless. I can’t remember a single noteworthy event that has come from one of these meetings in the last two decades.

If we want to improve the planet and the welfare of its citizens, the solution is simple. We, the citizens, have to take action ourselves. We cannot leave it to those at the top because, as they have shown time and time again, they won’t act until it’s too late.

To change the planet for the better, we need to realise we’re all in it together for better or worse — and the only way to make it better is to take action.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Walking to do my weekly shopping the other day, I noticed an inordinate amount of plastic along the way.

Since I started actively looking for it and picking it up, I’ve begun to notice it everywhere. It’s on the road, it’s in bushes and it’s discarded along footpaths.

Plastic is indiscriminate, it gets everywhere. There is nowhere safe from it. To put things into perspective, it’s not like the route is littered with plastic. It’s nowhere near as bad as the sheer amount of plastic I saw while backpacking in the Philippines. Nonetheless, it’s still bad.

Once you’ve become aware of something, it’s very hard to become unaware of it. Even when I’m not actively thinking about plastic pollution, I’ll spot a stray piece of plastic out of the corner of my eye.

We have come to accept this as part of our lives. The spread of plastic is a consequence of the consumer age and the laissez-faire attitudes some of us have.

But this is the key point — it’s only some of us that have these attitudes. Throwing plastic indiscriminately on the floor with no thought for where it may end up is abhorrent to me.

To others, it seems like it’s natural. This attitude baffles me. We all inhabit the same planet. Your actions don’t just affect you, they affect everyone around you too.

If you’re too lazy to put your rubbish in the bin, it doesn’t go away after you’ve walked away. It stays there until someone comes along and picks it up.

No one wants to live on a planet littered with waste, but that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re swimming in the stuff. It permeates every corner of the globe.

It’s no good to blame one person, one group of people, or one nation, it’s a global problem. It stems from not realising that we are in it together. We all have a stake in the health of the planet, no matter how rich or poor we are.

It’s no good to walk past that plastic bottle on the floor or to not look the homeless person on the street in the eye. They will still be there. The situation we have now globally is akin to this. Too many of us are turning a blind eye to problems that can be collectively solved at an individual and local level.

We can consume less, use less plastic, devote more time to improving our communities. No wants to live in a city littered with rubbish, no one in their right minds wants to live in a society that is okay with homeless people sleeping rough, but here we are.

It’s 2020 and it feels like problems have become taboo. To talk about them is to be met with derision, to be accused of fear-mongering and being unrealistic.

If we play on divisions, we will end up divided. It’s time we realised our actions, however small, have a wider effect on the world. Things can, and should be better, it’s not too much to ask, it’s asking for the minimum.

It’s time we realised we’re all in it together and start making the future a better place for us and those to come.

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