plastic footprint

  In the days when Australia had a carbon policy we were all introduced to the notion of our environmental footprint and used the helpful counters provided to add up the greenhouse emissions for which each of us, as an individual, could be held accountable.  We checked what we ate, how many trips on an airline we had had, how often we used the car rather than taking public transport, and we looked beyond the convenience of our lifestyle to the energy required to make it happen and the way in which that energy was produced.

 Now we have become aware of the damage that plastic is doing to the environment, and so we are being encouraged to estimate our plastic footprint, that is, the amount of plastic that each one of us is personally responsible for in our daily life, as in plastic bottles and containers, plastic keyboards and toys, plastic clothes, microbeads in shampoo and creams, and so on.  The more we use, the more plastic will end up as rubbish somewhere.  The main focus is on single-use plastic, as in plastic cutlery, drinking straws and shopping bags, but the aim is to reduce the use of plastic in total.