Plastic is a major problem and anyone that still has yet to realize that is either sleepwalking through life or simply doesn’t care. It is reported that the average person now ingests an average of 5 grams of microplastics every week, or about the equivalent of a credit card. Hungry? Yet, despite this, almost 400 tons of plastic are produced each year. To date of the 6.3 billion tons of plastic waste produced, only 9% has ever been recycled!
This week Google has decided to take action and announced that it has partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy Initiative, whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Google has been a member of the foundation since 2015.
The circular economy has three main goals:
- To eliminate all unnecessary and problematic items.
- Come up with innovative plastics that can either be reused, recycled, or composted.
- To circulate all of the items they use to keep them in the economy and out of the environment.
For the people at Google, they have announced they will be maximizing the reuse of resources across all of its operations, products and supply chains, with the intent to enable others to do the same. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation unites more than 400 businesses, governments, and other organizations.
Mike Werner, Lead for Circular Economy, Google Global Sustainability Team, reports, “As a partner, we’ll support these organizations in the goal of ending plastic waste through packaging redesign and new delivery models.”
Sander Defruyt, Lead of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics commented on the partnership:
This is a really exciting opportunity to expand the possible solutions this network can work on, from applying technology to support new delivery models, to monitoring towards creating better transparency on global plastic material flows and leakage. Through developing and using new data tools, such as through this partnership with Google, we can solve key challenges in the transition to a circular economy for plastics.
Google has also been making other efforts. They have partnered with Earth 911 with hopes to make better-informed decisions about what to recycle and where in North America. They have announced that all “Nest” products launching in 2019 will be built using recycled plastics, and by 2022 all Made by Google products will include recycled materials. They also plan to work with other companies to encourage a reduction of plastic use and how to most effectively apply similar changes.
To end this plastic problem we must rethink everything from design, production, unnecessary packaging, over usage, our recycling or lack of, to our disposal. In other words, we must come up with a new way we operate on a day to day basis. This is going to take a collective involvement from all humans on this planet. We all need to be part of this solution.
It’s good to see that more companies are taking action and partnering with existing programs to help make the changes we must have. I hope that they can help to fund these programs and together they can find ways to clean up this plastic mess.
