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UK to ban plastic straws and cotton buds |
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by Neha Swaminathan | 20-04-2018 02:42
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UK is planning to ban the use of cotton buds, plastic drinking straws and other single-use plastics from sale in England from 2019 onwards. By doing this UK wants to stem the rot in pollution of the world?s rivers and oceans. A consultation will start later in 2018, and a ban could be enforced as early as next year. Theresa May, Prime Minister of UK, will also persuade the Commonwealth heads of government to join the efforts to save the environment. According to her, "The Commonwealth is a unique organization with a huge diversity of wildlife, and environments – so it is vital we act now." Cotton buds are often flushed down the lavatory and end up being eaten by birds and marine life. It is estimated that there are 150m tonnes of plastic in the world?s oceans, and over 100,000 sea mammals die from eating or getting tangled up in plastic waste. Plastic microbeads have already been banned; the introduction of the 5p charge on plastic bags has led to a big reduction in their consumption by public. Campaigners said these moves might reduce the country's marine plastic pollution by half. More efforts like the Treasury's research into the impact of a charge on disposable coffee cups and a deposit return scheme on plastic bottles are also being planned to curtail the pollution. The above moves are great initiatives at the government level and welcome move. Source: BBC News |
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Previous : Youth Changing the world
4 Comments
I read about this! It is great!
Posted 22-04-2018 07:56
Hello Neha, very clean and informative report to be!
Unfortunately, I just used cotton buds a couple of minutes ago and then I found out this report's title has something to do with 'cotton bud'!
I never knew this fact that it affects life cycles and becomes threat to birds and marine ecosystem.
This also might be local cumulative problem, developing into international environment problem as well!
Which countries like UK do ban or are planning to ban use of cotton buds? Can you share more stories about them to us?!
Posted 22-04-2018 05:44
Hello Neha!
It is nice to hear news about governments taking action in conserving the environment. The overuse of plastics became a world wide problem. Plastic do not naturally degrade and is harmful when it gets in to our bio- system. Especially when these goes in to micro fine level, it easily gets accumulated through the food chain. So I hope more efforts could be done on this issue!
Thanks for the report :)
Posted 21-04-2018 00:55
This is very good news. Plastics pose a great danger to the environment. There has always been attempts to ban plastics in many countries which are always always undermined by strong economic arguments.
I hope however that we can have strong leadership to enforce this all around the globe
Posted 20-04-2018 05:02