Transcriber: Chawanrat Sukhuwit Reviewer: Miki Murakami
I'd like to take you on a little journey.
Close your eyes and picture your favorite beach. Smell the salt air.
Listen to the waves. Hear the birds.
Now imagine a garbage truck backing its way down the beach and dumping
an entire load of plastic directly into the sea. You can open your eyes.
An estimated two and a half garbage trucks worth of plastic enter our lakes,
rivers and oceans every minute
of every hour of every day of the year.
The consequences of that plastic pollution are both devastating
and expensive. Plastics threaten marine ecosystems and choke
and ensnare iconic wildlife species.
Turtles, dolphins and seabirds are among
the nearly 700 species that we know have interacted with plastic.
These nearly indestructible items that persist on our coastlines
and in our parks are ugly.
Costing money not only to clean them up, but in many cases,
millions of dollars of lost tourism revenue every year
because visitors will travel farther to enjoy cleaner shores.
Single use plastic bags block stormwater drains,
contributing to flooding, which not only damages valuable infrastructure,
but can also cost human lives.
The impacts of plastic go farther. Plastics are petroleum product.
And the energy, the process of extracting those fuels, transporting them,
refining them and creating plastics,
emits hundreds of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases every year.
Somewhere between 4 to 8% of our entire global petroleum budget is dedicated
to making plastic. And that number is only increasing as our appetite
for plastic grows.
In the next two decades,
demand for plastic products is expected to double.
And emissions associated with plastics are projected to surpass those of coal
fired power plants by the year 2030.
Our current relationship with plastic is not sustainable.
But if we step back a minute,
it's easy to see why our world has become clogged with plastic.
It's cheap to produce and incredibly versatile.
It can be used to replace almost everything from auto parts to human parts.
Plastic helps keep hospital room safe and sterile.
Plastic masks help prevent the spread of diseases.
Plastic knees, hips and heart valves,
prolong our longevity, and increase our quality of life.
Food packaged in plastic lasts longer, so there's less wastage.
And lightweight plastic packaging enables lower carbon costs for transportation.
So how do we maintain the benefits of this miracle product while reducing
the impacts? For the past decade, I've been studying plastic pollution,
its impacts on wildlife and the effectiveness of
the actions we humans take to try to limit its spread in the environment.
Through my work, I've seen firsthand some of the consequences of plastic.
But today I want you to imagine a different future.
A future where plastic still plays an important role,
but where we have the technology to manage it in an integrated, holistic,
self-sustaining system.
Let's picture our current model of plastic production as a pipeline.
We create something plastic, we use it, and when we're finished with it,
it might get recycled, but more than likely it is disposed of.
Only about 12% of the plastic we use in Australia is recycled,
leaving the rest to clog landfills,
be incinerated or potentially make its way to the environment, first to land,
and then eventually some of that plastic will make its way to the ocean.
In Australia alone, we use about three and
a half million tonnes of plastic every year.
By weight, that’s the equivalent of 21 Sydney Opera houses,
or if you’re more familiar with blue whales,
about 32,500 of them.
Somewhere between 35 to 70%
of that plastic is designed to be used
for less time than it takes you to fuel up your car.
Consider the plastic fork that came with your last takeaway meal.
You use it for a few minutes and then you toss it away.
But that plastic will persist long enough to be used by your grandchildren's,
grandchildren's grandchildren and beyond.
If we look at the top ten items that were collected during international coastal
cleanup events in 2019,
every single one of them is a single use plastic.
These are the plastics we need to worry about.
Not the Tupperware you inherited from your grandmother.
There are potential solutions that can intervene all along that pipeline.
So where do we begin? Show of hands,
who’s heard of the ocean cleanup project where a big boom is being deployed in
the middle of the ocean to collect plastic from the Pacific garbage patch?
Yeah, a few of you. The project works at the tail end of this plastic pipeline.
It's been successful at raising awareness of the problem and funds
for solving it. But fishing plastic out of the middle of the ocean is
an expensive, carbon-costly exercise.
It might help, but it can never eliminate the problem.
If water was gushing out of a burst washing machine hose,
would you focus on bailing out your house
or do you start by turning off your tap? Eventually you'll have to do both.
But the highest priority is to turn that tap off,
or you'll be bailing for the rest of your life.
We need to stop plastic before it enters the ocean in the first place.
Here's a little story about Hulu, a company in Western Australia.
Hulu has a vision to replace petroleum based plastics with natural alternatives
made from farmed seaweed. The resulting material is both durable as well as
truly biodegradable, and the process of farming the seaweed has
a host of other benefits. As it grows,
the seaweed removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and absorbs some of
the excess nutrients that runoff from the land.
The seaweed provides a habitat for marine animals and a livelihood
for people living in remote coastal communities.
This is just one example of
a company working to replace plastic before it even enters that pipeline.
The reality is, though, that even if we could replace a 10th of
the plastic that we currently use with better alternatives,
it wouldn't be enough. Where there's a demand
for cheap plastic products packaged in shiny plastic,
the market will continue to fill that demand.
What is called for now is a radical shift in our relationship with plastic.
There are few things that can inspire people to change how they act.
Some people are motivated by an appeal to their environmental consciousness.
Over the past decade, we've seen
an enormous increase in public awareness of the plastic problem and demand
for solutions. We can measure that change.
At CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency,
we’ve been conducting coastline surveys
and along with data from Keep Australia Beautiful’s National Litter Index,
we have seen an overall decrease in
the amount of plastic in Australia's environment over the past decade.
That shows that what we're doing is working,
but we need to accelerate the pace of that change.
Financial drivers can provide strong impetus for motivating rapid change.
When we analysed surveys of plastic in the environment,
we found that in states where you get a deposit back for returning your bottles
and cans, in other words, where plastic has a monetary value,
there were up to 40% fewer containers in the environment.
40% is a huge amount.
We found virtually the same result in the United States.
But that's just containers.
Imagine if for every plastic item you purchased, you paid an extra cent.
So for a plastic toy packaged in plastic and shipped in plastic,
you might pay an extra 3 cents. Not a lot, but it adds up.
That money could be invested into developing alternatives to plastic,
an infrastructure and technology for recycling
and reuse, that would substantially help to close the loop on plastic.
Let's come now to Tasmania, Australia,
where we are today, to envision what this new relationship with plastic could
look like. Our island home is somewhat remote off the south coast of
the Australian mainland, on the edge of the Southern Ocean,
which makes transport and logistics for processing plastic
all the more difficult. To be successful,
we have to tackle the problem from multiple fronts.
Already right here on our doorstep in Hobart,
we’re using technology to help us better manage our waste.
We've developed a system of smart sensors in stormwater drains to better monitor
the debris that becomes trapped.
And we're trialling these now with the city of Hobart.
The sensors are connected by the Internet of Things
so they can speak to each other and they can also speak to us.
They can alert council when the stormwater drain is full
and in danger of becoming blocked.
But they could also be used to monitor plastic flows upstream
and downstream of industrial facilities, retail operations, building sites.
By knowing where plastic is being lost to the environment, we can quickly,
safely and smartly manage it as close to the source as possible.
The costs of installing these sensors could be included in development
applications, and fines for waste leakage could provide funds to manage
the program.
But innovative technology is just one piece of the puzzle.
Let's turn now to the industrial sector.
Imagine if we could close the loop on all the plastics used by the fruit
and agriculture industry across the state.
Currently, much of the plastic waste produced is stockpiled for later recovery
or recycling. We could develop alternatives for items where possible
and for items where there are no better alternatives,
we could invest in recycling facilities right here in Tasmania to reprocess that
waste back into the same materials to be used again on the farms.
This is not a pipe dream. CSIRO has already developed a spray
on biodegradable mulch film.
Fruit growers are shifting to using cardboard to market their berries instead
of plastic. But most importantly,
the industry is committed to becoming a partner and leader in this space.
We can make substantial change in just a few years.
We start with the agriculture industry and then expand out to other sectors.
Moving back up the plastic pipeline.
Companies that produce and manufacture plastic items can also catalyze change.
What if, for every shipping container that arrived full of plastic items
packaged in plastic, one returned with the discarded items,
the discarded packaging for processing and managing by
the companies that produced that waste. What if the true costs of plastic,
the costs that are currently being borne by local councils, by the environment,
by wildlife--what if those became part of the cost of doing business?
In Australia, product stewardship models similar to this are being developed
for plastic packaging, agricultural films and tyres, among other items.
If we implement a suite of solutions all along the plastic pipeline,
we can build piece by piece systems to help us reduce,
reuse and recycle our plastic resources into the future.
Already determined action has created rapid change.
Have a look at these before and after photos taken in Jakarta.
The Indonesian government committed to addressing the waste problem
and within just two years had cleaned up 12 major canals and are now tackling
a host of smaller ones. Both the Indian and
the Indonesian governments have recently begun multimillion dollar partnerships
with the Australian Government to decrease plastic waste.
But it's not just governments.
That's the really inspiring and heartening thing to come out of
the plastic pollution crisis. We, the people really can make a difference.
Just look at Melati and Isabel Wijsen.
At age 12 and 10, they started
the Bye Bye Plastic Bags campaign to ban single use plastic bags on
the island of Bali, which was signed into law four years later.
And here in Australia, nine-year-old Molly Steer started
the Straw No More campaign,
a movement which helped lead
the Cairns Regional Council to ban single use plastics.
Consider this. Nearly every piece of plastic that ends up in the ocean
was once in someone’s hand.
We as individuals, we as voters, we as students, as ratepayers,
as council members, as industry partners, as government officials, as influencers--
we all have a role to play
in creating and supporting the clean, healthy,
economically viable and environmentally rich and diverse planet
we want to live on.
To achieve this, we need to change the way we think about plastic.
Instead of viewing it as a disposable item to be tossed away after minutes of
use without a second thought,
let’s envision a future where plastic is
a valuable resource worthy of being preserved.
If we keep this vision in mind with every deliberate action, policy,
direction and design we take towards plastic,
we will create the future we desire. Thank you.