It’s time to say bye-bye to toxic plastic waste. Here's how: Here's Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet, one of the most recognized organizations tackling the plastic crisis and its impact on human health and biodiversity, at Impact/Week 2024. Ticket applications for Impact/Week 2025 are now open: norrsken.org/impactweek
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We don't take things from nature and toxify them. We take them and we process them. Potatoes, bacteria in meat, and beans become less toxic through cooking. Every process is going to have a GHG impact, a potential for human toxicity, a potential for environmental toxicity, and an effect on human quality of life. We need to be systematic about minimizing harms and maximizing good. Shifting towards reusable systems may take more energy and increase plastic energy (this is what happened with "reusable" plastic bags), eliminating packaging without consideration may increase food waste, and going towards paper packaging may lead to people treating paper with harmful chemicals that make it worse than plastic.
Brilliant.
Brilliant as always. Thank you Sian for just saying it as it is, and stopping the useless language we use to make ourselves feel better and getting something to fit into our convenient lives, always at the expense of nature!
Love it. Solving for symptoms can feel good, but doesn't always do good. It fixes downstream symptoms; Reducing, re-using & recycling. Plastic bottle caps attached through more plastic. Solving for causes can feel bad, but can change the world. We feel smaller, get less direct feedback, aren't seen as heroes as the solutions are often collective, interconnected, systemic & non-linear. Roughly 9% of plastic is recycled & becomes more toxic each time. So when we with good intentions push for recycling it isn't actually moving us towards real solutions. It's keeping us stuck. Why? Because we exhaust our motivation & the incentive in the market is unchanged or reinforced. Since recycling teaches individuals to focus on their own responsibility to "do better" instead of changing initial inputs; the materials themselves. Materials could be designed to become soil again. The tech exists. But then we need enough individuals & orgs breaking the myth of separation and thinking, caring & acting for collective and causal solutions. This is really the systemic leadership we need.
Thank you Sian Sutherland for working relentlessly to increase awareness of plastic pollution and its horrifying consequences, but also talking about solutions 🌟
co-CEO at Norrsken Foundation
2moTime for materials that are good for our bodies and for a living planet! 🌱, 🌍, 🤩. Hats off to the pioneers Sian Sutherland, NBCo, Grale (formerly PlasticFri®), Blue Ocean Closures, Nordic SeaFarm, Sekab for leading the better material revolution! Who else would you like to see more of?