Across our site offices, ADCW has organised several initiatives today to support the UN theme \u2018Beat Plastic Pollution\u2019, including a ‘great plastic pick-up’ and a brown bag plastic-free lunch challenge \u2013 no Tupperware allowed!\u00a0 Or plastic containers, plastic wrappers, clingfilm, plastic yoghurt pots, plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic bottles\u00a0 – anything of that kind.\u00a0 Staff also tuned in to a free lunchtime webinar on plastic pollution, hosted by the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment.<\/p>\n
Plastic is vital for many aspects of our work \u2013 particularly in the construction industry. Plastic hard hats have saved countless lives on construction sites, while plastic safety glasses protect our eyes.\u00a0 Without plastic we wouldn\u2019t have computers, mobile phones or cars.<\/p>\n
But the big environmental problem is around single use plastics and the quantities in which these are used.<\/p>\n
Every year 8 million tonnes of plastic such as water bottles enter our oceans, threatening marine and human life and destroying natural ecosystems. Current projections forecast that there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. Two-thirds of plastic in oceans comes from land-based sources, including litter left on beaches, and washed down rivers and drains. The remainder is from materials lost at sea; such as containers going overboard (remember the bath tub ducks!) or lost fishing gear.<\/p>\n
We should all look for new opportunities to remove single use plastics from our ways of working. \u00a0ADCW has already made some progress to reduce single use plastics at our site offices, by removing disposable plastic cups from drinking water dispensers. \u00a0Last year we used almost 31,000 plastic cups, which take about 450 years to breakdown in landfill. \u00a0Our Bulford office innovatively donated all their remaining un-used plastic cups to a local school.<\/p>\n
We can all play our part to reduce plastic pollution at work and in our daily lives.<\/p>\n
Just remember \u2013 if you can\u2019t reuse it, refuse it!<\/p>\n
\uf0b7 100,000 marine animals killed by plastics each year<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 90% of bottled water found to contain plastic particles<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 83% of tap water found to contain plastic particles<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 50% of consumer plastics are single use<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 10% of all human generated waste is plastic<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 17 million barrels of oil used on plastic production annually<\/span><\/p>\n \uf0b7 Tiny pieces of plastic were found in 48% of a sample of the deepest living sea creatures, 2,000m (6,561.8ft) below the sea surface.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tuesday 5 June is UN World Environment Day and we’re joining in the fight against one of the planet\u2019s biggest environmental challenges – plastic pollution. Across our site offices, ADCW has organised several initiatives today to support the UN theme \u2018Beat Plastic Pollution\u2019, including a ‘great plastic pick-up’ and a brown bag plastic-free lunch challenge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adcw-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aspiredefence.co.uk\/adcw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}