Great Wrap beats Sad Wrap!
In 2000 I spent a year on Macquarie Island doing science stuff. One of the projects we ran was the collection of plastic bits on Sandell Bay, a 2km beach located on the Island West coast. This was done every month. Not really to clean the beach, but to analyse the stuff, figure out where it came from and get a better understanding of the Southern Ocean sea currents. Anyway, collecting about 3 full garbage bags of plastic bits every month on such a remote location is a bit scary, isn’t it?
Scary but not so surprising considering that nowadays at least 8 million tons of the stuff end up in the oceans every year. That’s about a garbage truck per minute.
A good proportion of this is wrapping sheets. I mean the stuff around hay bales, for example, and just about anything produced by humans. Food wrap is part of that. It is very bad for sea creatures and for us as well: two major reports last year linked 175 compounds to health problems connected to cancers, fertility and fetal development.
What can we do about it? We can stop using the stuff, or use better stuff. Meet Julia and Jordy Kay from Melbourne. They got horrified by the amount of wrapping involved in their jobs. So Jordy quit his and they developed a way to make a wrap sheet from a waste product, potato peels. They call it Great Wrap. If you compost the stuff it disappears in 180 days. Good on you, guys!
References:
Marine plastic pollution: https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/marine-plastics
Glad Wrap: https://www.forgerecycling.co.uk/blog/ditch-cling-film-2/
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