Are straws the real enemy?

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What if you could exceed your corporate "Environmental and Social Responsibility" targets, make a significant saving in the logistical handling of your products, reduce chemical storage space by 80%, decrease the occupational health and safety issues and help the planet all at the same time!

More ocean, less plastic The plastic pollution problem was recently, quite rightly, described as a planetary crisis by the United Nations.

As the public awareness grows around the scale of the issue our products become more relevant to our customers and are a considerable contributor
to their Corporate Environmental and Social Responsibility targets. The drastic and immediate reduction of single use plastic is of critical importance to all of us with the environmental challenges we face today.

The world watched as someone pulled a straw from a turtles nose, then something unprecedented happened, the world stood up and demanded change.

It made straws public enemy number one!

But what about the billions of plastic chemical containers that are dumped in the landfills each and every day, these barely get a mention and this must change. Almost all are contaminated so they are not just dumping millions of tons of plastic a day, but a combined amount of billions of litres of toxic chemicals into our soils, water ways, oceans and atmosphere every year!

We made a start with PVOH encased cleaning sachets to eliminate the use of plastic containers, drums and the hundreds of millions of plastic trigger spray bottles manufactured every single day, our problem is how do we get companies to move to them?

We have made them cheaper than the standard products, they are a considerably more effective, commercial grade product, they slash the health and safety issues of handling chemicals, they eliminate the need for single use plastic containers, they reduce the amount of storage required, the slash the cost of logistics and they rid the planet from billions of contaminated chemical containers, so why are companies not taking as much notice of them as a paper straw?

Is it all about the feel good factor, they are only interested if the public demands it?

What happened to corporate responsibility, why is the only reduction of plastic that seen by the public?

We have moved away from plastic straws and have started using recycled plates so we look like we are „doing our bit“ but what about the bit ticket plastic items, what about all the thousands of plastic chemical bottles, containers and IBC’s that are being dumped away from the public’s eyes?

What would happen if companies payed more that lip service and „token gestures“ to the reduction of plastics?

What if they actually followed through on their plastic reductions written into their environmental policies?

What is stopping companies from changing?

Contributed by Shelly Holland