Yesterday was World Oceans Day, established by the United Nations to remind us of the importance of our oceans. 70% of our planet is ocean and even though we all know that trees produce oxygen, it’s actually the oceans that provide us with 70% of our oxygen. Therefore it’s important to protect our oceans. Something we are currently not doing. Quite the opposite actually. We are polluting our oceans at a tremendous rate.
Every minute, the equivalent of one full garbage truck of plastic trash is dumped in the sea. That is 1440 trucks per 24 hours and 8 billion kilos per yearPlastic Soup Foundation
We use a lot of single use plastics!
Most of the plastics in our oceans are so-called Single Use Plastics (SUP). As the name implies these plastics are specifically designed for a short lifespan, like packaging materials. Even companies dedicated to cleaning the oceans like United By Blue seem to have no way around them. They recently published their annual use of SUPs in their supply chain:
– 431,920 plastic poly bags
– 5,134 plastic swift tags
– 15,642 plastic bubble wrap sleeves
– 3,324 plastic trim bags
– 6,526 plastic fabric roll packaging
– 255 plastic binder sleeves
– 149,248 feet of plastic shrink wrap
– 214,400 feet of plastic tape
A pledge to quit single use plastics
For a company organizing events to clean the plastic pollution from the oceans it’s very contradicting to still depend on so much plastics. That is why United By Blue has pledged to remove the above mentioned plastics from their supply chain and business operations. When? They set the deadline on World Oceans Day 2020! Read more about what these plastics are and how they plan to eliminate them here.
United By Blue gives itself just a year to drastically change the way things are done, and they invite us to also #QuitSingleUse!