One million every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every year: right now that’s how many single-use plastic bottles are sold around the world, usually containing just water or soft drinks.
‘The shores are absolutely covered with bottles’ How do plastic bottles end up in the sea?
They become brittle, eventually break into smaller pieces and become magnets for other pollutants before being mistakenly eaten by marine life, thus entering the food chain.
In August last year, Britain’s Plymouth University reported that plastic was discovered inside a third of the fish caught in the United Kingdom – including shellfish, cod and haddock.
“And when I’m diving, they’re always present in the water, too.
I end up collecting them, and once filled seven large bags with nothing but plastic bottles during a dive off the coast of Dibba.
And the drinks companies like consumers to see the contents, so there’s little incentive for them to change their ways.
China is currently the world’s leading consumer of bottled drinks, with increasing urbanisation, concerns about tap-water quality and groundwater contamination driving the demand.
The irony here is that plastic bottles themselves are poisoning the groundwater people are so afraid of drinking – a classic example of the snake eating itself.
But while we’re probably not in need of such a craft, we could install water filters in our homes so that tap water would be perfectly palatable.