BANGKOK: On her lunch break, Bangkok office worker Chinapa Payakha emerges from a 7-Eleven store with two plastic bags. One holds a Big Gulp soft drink. The other carries her lunch, with a banana in its own plastic wrapper. “For office life, plastic bags are necessary,” said Chinapa, 34, whose shopping habits illustrate the challenges facing anti-plastic campaigners in Thailand, where plastic bags are handed out in abundance on any visit to a shop or market.
As World Environment Day on Tuesday takes place and the United Nations calls for the “biggest-ever worldwide cleanup” of plastic pollution, experts are focused on Southeast Asia, home to four of the world’s top marine plastic polluters. From major cities like Bangkok and Jakarta to beach resorts in the Philippines and Vietnam, plastic bags and bottles are the ubiquitous face of pollution in the region.
Globally, some eight million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the ocean every year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain, according to the UN Environment Programme. Five Asian countries — China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand — accounted for up to 60 per cent of the plastic waste leaking into the ocean, according to a 2015 report by the environmental campaigner Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.
Three years on, a “trash emergency” on the Indonesian island of Bali and the Philippines’ decision to close the tourist island of Boracay showed governments are recognising the impact of plastic waste, said Susan Ruffo, Ocean Conservancy’s managing director for international initiatives.
“But this is not just a government responsibility — corporations, civil society and citizens all have a part to play,” she said. — Reuters
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