Watch the film below ...and also read about asking your Senedd Member to back the rollout of our all-Wales Precious Plastic programme:
The Story of Stuff Project's excellent film "The Story of Plastics" is nominated for an Emmy on September 29th -it gets our vote! To our old friend Annie Leonard in America, a huge congratulations from Wales. Find time to watch it (below) and write to your MS in Wales about what you think immediately - it's a game-changer like no other. Senedd members in Wales can react to this, quite simply, by backing the people-owned system of closing the loop on plastic forever, that Circular Communities Cymru intends to roll out. Their support of course would ensure that this happens more quickly.
Before or after the film, this is what you could tell them/enlighten them on. With oil producers facing the prospect of markets being closed to them, i.e. with the advent of electric and hydrogen cars, they decided to do to find new markets that will undermine any carbon reduction goals gained by a switch to electric. They're now drilling and fracking at an ever-increasing rate in order to feed more plastic packaging into the system. To create the demand for this, the oil firms back incineration of 'waste' over recycling. That way they can continue to profit from further oil excavation.
Because society has long cottoned on to the fact that incineration is destructive, they no longer refer to it as such. Instead, 'energy from waste' is the term used to ensure that decision-makers and society at large can be duped into supporting the oil industry; and it sadly works. It is THE worst form of green-washing with the sole intent of destroying finite materials. They have even devised means of turning plastic into car fuel, which when burnt, is gone for good. This is the plastic incineration that you and I might have been campaigning against but it's now proposed to be carried out within your own car, cynically tying everyone into a continuing buy and burn model.
Circular Communities Cymru will always offer the solution hand in hand with citing the problem. We are Zero Waste practitioners and lead through exemplar.
An answer, that we have suggested for a long time within Wales, is to treat plastic like a precious commodity. That is why we are rolling out an updated Precious Plastic programme, as the official Welsh agency for its development, to the whole of Wales. This way, we the people, will control and harness this precious and finite commodity before ever having to step in and untangle plastic from the necks of turtles or pull it out from the stomachs of dead whales.
The only way to stop further fracking and drilling is for us, in our communities in Wales, to build a system that captures and recirculates the plastic-like no other nation on earth. Let's be that exemplar, other countries will follow our lead. It is our moral duty to close the loop on plastics ensuring that here in Wales we have the infrastructure to do just that. Circular Communities Cymru intends to do just that come what may.
