Stop the plastic: Opinion

The more time your spend around the waterways the greater your awareness of the sea of pollution and the shameful situation we humans have created.

Around my backyard, Sydney Harbour, the rubbish levels are ridiculous, with plastic and Styrofoam litter pushed well up into the scrub, jammed between rocks and gibbers, embedded deep in the sand and soil.

Even taking a casual Sunday stroll around the new harbourside parkland of Barangaroo the other day revealed refuse forever wedged between the sandstone gibbers, almost like some kind of glue or cement that keeps the city and our modern society together.

Plastic bottles, bottle tops, soya-sauce fish containers, foam, old fishing floats and general refuse abounds on harbour beaches. The problem of microplastic after this stuff breaks down is a less obvious problem on our waterways. Washing of synthetic clothes is also to blame for the spread of minute plastic fibres.

In the US, President Obama recently signed a bill that prohibits selling and distributing products containing microbeads, those tiny plastic particles measuring less than 5 millimetres in diameter used for the purpose of exfoliating or cleansing. The bill is intended to protect the nation's waterways. Australia has to move on this rubbish.

Scientists have revealed we have a serious microplastic problem on our waterways. The highest concentrations in Sydney are in the sediment around upper Middle Harbour at the foot of gentrified suburbs. Too much face cleaning using tiny abrasive plastic particles. How stupid. What about pumice? Have we gone mad?
    
The CSIRO recently determined around 8 million metric tonnes of plastic goes into the oceans each year. That’s 16 shopping-bags full of plastic for every metre of coastline (excluding Antarctica).

The most conservative estimates say by 2025 we will be putting enough plastic in the ocean to cover 5 per cent of the earth’s entire surface in cling film each year.

Around a third of this likely comes from China and 10 per cent from Indonesia. However, Americans produce more than 2.5kg of plastic waste per person each day, more than twice the amount of people in China.

Plastic is choking our world to death and its use needs to be curtailed and then stopped.

As a nation of anglers, we pitch a lot of plastic into the ocean. If not the bag from a pack of prawns sailing off the wharf then it's the lures and lines we arm ourselves with.

There are biodegradable fishing lines and lures out there, but before long we’ll have to think seriously about mandating their use and inventing tackle that doesn’t contribute to the untenable not-so-fantastic plastic invasion.

Boaters in all guises are reliant on plastic. Not just for hulls, but for sails, sheets, lines, and other ropes. Today's yachts are largely plastic. Our inflatable tenders are plastic. The fittings in our engines are increasingly plastic. Everything has gone plastic.

Even boats like the Greenlines are made of plastic, but with solar panels and batteries to claim they are environmentally friendly. Now a timber boat, well, that is a much more sensible thing.

In a 2014 report, CSIRO scientist Denise Hardesty and her team surveyed sites approximately every 100km along the Australian coastline. She found about three-quarters of the rubbish along the coast is plastic. Most is from Australian sources, not the high seas, with debris concentrated near cities.

The density of plastic in Australian waters ranges from a few thousand pieces of plastic per square kilometre to more than 40,000 pieces. The Tasman Sea south of Australia is a global hotspot for seabird impacts.

"We found that 43 per cent of seabirds have plastic in their gut. Globally, nearly half of all seabird species are likely to ingest debris, eating everything from balloons to glow sticks, industrial plastic pellets, rubber, foam and string," Hardesty said. Estimates suggest every seabird in the world will soon have plastic in its system.

Meantime, we need to really think about that old plastic boat and recycling the GRP or fibreglass hulls as is happening in Europe. Because at the current rate we will end up suffocating the world in plastic. Old mooring minders are eventual enviro hazards.

Each one of us can limited our use of plastic and packaging to some degree, however, the big problem is the source. Big business needs to be pay a plastic tax. This way, they might think of other alternatives to its dreaded use. Organic 'plastics' like those made from hemp are cool.

However, right now we appear far from the point of peak plastic. That's worrying. It's everywhere. It's time for the world to act on the pervasive problem of plastic before we choke in the stuff. We need to clean-up the oceans where, one day, we'll probably all be living anyway.