UN Environment* — The ongoing global movement for eliminating plastics is gaining momentum in Africa. Several countries are now taking steps to eliminate the production and distribution of single-use plastics, some adopting a total ban on the production and use of plastic bags.
Cameroon, Egypt, Eritrea, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Tanzania have taken the lead, others, like Botswana and Ethiopia, are following suit.
10 July 2018 (UN Environment)* — “When I take my little girl to the store, I always tell her buy what you need, not what you want! I must be the only shopkeeper who tells customers not to buy more!”
This in a nutshell sums up Florence Tay’s passion. Her easy, friendly manner welcomes one into her store “Unpackt”, located in the heart of Singapore’s suburban neighbourhood Ang Mo Kio.
Unpackt is the city-state’s first zero-waste grocery and lifestyle concept store. With a 5.6 million population, Singapore’s consumption trajectory is only set to grow exponentially.
9 July 2018 (UN Environment)* — In the Port of Amsterdam, a new factory is being built that could revolutionize the way we dispose of plastic waste. Utilizing groundbreaking technology, the facility will use previously unrecyclable plastic to create fuel for diesel powered cargo ships.
3 July 2018 (UN Environment)* – Modern life would be impossible without plastic – but we have long since lost control over our invention. Why has plastic turned into a problem and what do we know about its dangers?
This video is a collaboration with UN Environment and their Clean Seas campaign, If you want to take action to turn the tide on plastics, go to cleanseas and make your pledge.
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We [UN Enviroment] also partnered with askscience on reddit – on you can talk to experts and ask questions about about plastic pollution today!
14 June 2018 (UN Environment)* — In a remote village of the Himalayas, Kristin Kagetsu was struggling with a recipe. Not your average recipe for cooking up a delicious meal. This one was for making sustainable colored crayons. After trial and error, resulting in crayons of different shapes and sizes, Kagetsu finally hit on the right recipe and the crayons are still sold today.
But the experience taught her a valuable lesson: ingredients for truly sustainable products must be sourced locally.
Fast-forward five years, and twenty-eight-year-old Kagetsu, now Chief Executive Officer of Saathi pads, has teamed up with co-founder, twenty-six-year-old Tarun Bothra, to turn their attention to a more pressing environmental and social problem.
– Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the closure of what he described as “a successful G7 Summit with ambitious objectives” on the environmental front, including a status quo commitment on climate change and a G7 Ocean Plastics Charter endorsed by five nations.
It’s not what we wanted to find. When Greenpeace set sail to the Antarctic earlier this year, we were going to look for the incredible wildlife — tottering penguins, majestic whales, soaring seabirds — that call the Antarctic Ocean home.
7 June 2018 — An underwater photographer’s chance encounter with a starving turtle led to a personal “awakening” about the dangers discarded plastic poses to sea life in the world’s oceans.
Saeed Rashid | Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans is threatening marine life. | Photo from UN News Centre
In November 2017, Saeed Rashid from the United Kingdom was taking photos during a dive on a reef in the Egyptian Red Sea when he came across a female hawksbill turtle that had swallowed a plastic bag and was, as a result, unable to eat.
The turtle probably mistook the floating plastic bag for a jellyfish which hawksbills typically eat.
Many things we didn’t know turned out to hurt us. In the 1930s, consumers were sold on the health benefits of tobacco. We happily used asbestos to flame-proof buildings. We once thought mercury was a great treatment for syphilis.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 
