EDITORIAL - More needs to be done vs single-use plastic

In a laudable move, the National Solid Waste Management Commission recently listed coffee stirrers and plastic straws as among single-use plastic products that are non-environmentally acceptable and have to be phased out.

This means that those items may soon be illegal to use, although the restaurants and coffee shops that have them may still use up their remaining stocks.

There are other single-use items that should be on this list like those sleeves that come with individual apples, those packs that wrap a single orange, and the bags used in those “automated tubig machines” --the list is practically endless.

However, the single-use plastic with the biggest presence in our streets, landfills, and seas is the plastic sachet.

A lot of the things we need for everyday life comes in plastic sachets; soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, cooking oil, floor wax, body lotion, pet food, condiments, you name it.

Banning some single-use plastic products may not be enough if we want to clean up the environment and prevent floods; we have to wean the people away from their dependence on single-use plastic products, most especially plastic sachets.

Yes, we do realize buying things in sachets makes practical sense, especially to the poorer families who cannot buy items in bulk as well as those who live by themselves and don’t need much of anything, but we have to face the reality that many of us --and even in some cases our local government units-- cannot dispose of our plastic trash properly.

Sooner or later they end up where they shouldn’t be.

There is an urgent need to reduce our plastic waste now more than ever. We have already mentioned that this pandemic will result in a deluge of discarded plastic products that we had to use to secure ourselves and our loved one from COVID-19 as well as to save those who were infected by it.

If nothing is done to reduce the non-COVID-19 plastic trash already being produced by our growing population, we will soon be facing an environmental crisis.