Cape Epic saving our Oceans
The Cape Epics environmental policy to limit plastic water bottles is an approach all event organizers should be addressing.
With our Oceans under extreme threat from plastic, it is refreshing to see event organizers driving environmental issues and initiate policies at events to limit plastic bottle use. It takes re-educating the user and perhaps as more organizers become involved in environmental issues, it will take some branding to make us aware and more conscious.
“You might not care, even if you know,
but you can’t care if you don’t know”
Dr Sylvia Earle
“More than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped in our oceans every year.”
The proliferation of plastic products in the last 70 years or so has been extraordinary; quite simply we cannot now live without them. We are now producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year, half of which is for single use. More than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year.
Plastic is cheap and incredibly versatile with properties that make it ideal for many applications. However, these qualities have also resulted in it becoming an environmental issue. We have developed a “disposable” lifestyle and estimates are that around 50% of plastic is used just once and thrown away.
Plastic is a valuable resource and plastic pollution is an unnecessary and unsustainable waste of that resource. Packaging is the largest end use market segment accounting for just over 40% of total plastic usage.
Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.
A plastic bag has an average “working life” of 15 minutes.
Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.
Beverage Bottles Alone
According to the Container Recycling Institute, 100.7 billion plastic beverage bottles were sold in the U.S. in 2014, or 315 bottles per person.
57% of those units were plastic water bottles: 57.3 billion sold in 2014. This is up from 3.8 billion plastic water bottles sold in 1996, the earliest year for available data.
The process of producing bottled water requires around 6 times as much water per bottle as there is in the container.
14% of all litter comes from beverage containers. When caps and labels are considered, the number is higher.
