Plastic Free July; Be Inspired

There are many proverbs and sayings about the bigger impact that we can have as individuals when many of us are making small changes towards a common goal. Robert Kennedy famously said,

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls.

Many pebbles dropped at the same time can result in waves that reach distant shores and create real change. Plastic Free July is a testament to this, to the power of individuals making small changes that collectively have a huge measurable positive impact. 

We wanted to amplify their mission this month and pondered what to share in this blog post. The thing is, we thought that on many levels, we’re probably preaching to the choir here. Sharing ideas for how you can reduce your use of single-use plastics is probably redundant. A lot of you reading this probably already have reusable water bottles and shopping bags, you might have made your own beeswax food covers and a lot of you will have already switched to bar soap and bathroom products with less plastic. Additionally, if you do want to make changes, there are whole websites dedicated to guiding people through changes they can make and providing information.

Instead, we thought we’d share some highlights from the 2023 impact report from the Plastic Free Foundation as encouragement that making small changes can have an impact and as motivation to keep going, even though sometimes it seems pointless when you think about the waste created by huge businesses and multinational corporations.

Last year they estimate that 89 million individuals over 190 countries participated in Plastic Free July – which is a pretty staggering reach!! Over 14,000 workplaces, 7,000 schools and nearly 6,000 cafes and shops also participated and 87% of all participants made at least one lasting change. Household waste was reduced by: 

• 900 million kg for non-recoverable waste
• 700 million kg for recyclable waste
• 240 million kg for plastic consumption

And that’s all in one year alone! When you start to read about their long-term impact, things are even more impressive as they’ve recorded that over the last 5 years, participants have collectively avoided 10 billion kgs of waste (of which 1.4 billion is plastic) which averages to a reduction of 18kg in waste and recycling per person each year. Additionally, the campaign has inspired 223 million behaviour changes including large scale projects as well as individual changes. In the spirit of hopefulness we thought we’d share a few of the changes that have been made on a larger scale as a result of this campaign… 

• British Airways have eliminated 700 tonnes of single-use plastic annually by wrapping bedding in paper and removing pastic wrapping from in-flight items
• In Egypt, WNET collaborated with VeryNile to clean up waterways in the River Nile, benefitting both the environment and the local community 
• New Zealand have announced a single-use plastics ban which will remove 150 million plastic produce bags from circulation each year
• The LAX airport in the USA banned single-use plastic water bottles, with a scope of 80 million passengers annually having to adhere to this 
• In Argentina, the first stage of the ‘Julio Sin Plástica’ contest saw students encouraged to reuse and collect an astounding 25 tons of single-use plastic

It can feel overwhelming sometimes when we think about the sheer scale of the problem that we’re facing when it comes to the environment and apathy can set in as we start to think that there’s no point us trying to do anything when the mountain to climb is so high. But hopefully these facts and figures have done for you what they’ve done for us, given us hope. Hope that there are many people who care, many organisations that are committed to change. Hope that we can make positive and lasting impactful changes. Hope that humanity can and will fix the problems that it caused. Hope for a better, healthier world for future generations.

So why not head over to Plastic Free July and see if there are any projects going on near you that you can join in with? Or be inspired to make some more changes in your life and add your pebble to the ripples moving to create a current of change.

Author: Hannah Durdin, Content Officer & Forest School Leader

Date: Tuesday 16th July 2024